Mile North Hotel
Chicago, IL
Project Name: Digital Concierge
Description: I produced an interactive digital concierge for Mile North. It provided a hotel overview, Ferris & Jack restaurant menu, meeting room availability, and real-time flight information for O’Hare and Midway. It also provided maps, info QR codes and schedules for local attractions, restaurant, shopping and sports.
Role: Creative Director, Art Director, Illustrator, Designer, Art Buyer, Animator, Flash Developer
January 29, 2014
Article Link
Visitors at the 2014 Digital Signage Expo (DSE14) will be able to experience first hand how Keywest Technology’s innovative digital concierge application is benefiting hotel guests by giving information seekers options that reach beyond traditional efforts. Philips MMD is using the interactive software to showcase how combining creative endeavors with leading display technology creates very easy to deploy digital solutions that work on multiple levels of customer engagement.
The digital concierge does engagement better than other, less dynamic, information mediums, claims Keywest’s Brian Bibler, product innovator and chief designer. “Primarily,” Bibler says, “the digital concierge is about providing [hotel] guests relevant information that is just in the nick of time, which is the crux of digital engagement. For example, guests can find digital coupons for happy hour, dining availability and reservations, flight times, local event ticketing and weather forecasts.”
Keywest’s digital concierge provides information via touch screen icons. The icons provide avenues to relevant information, which are visually represented in stunning HD color and resolution on the commercial-grade Philips’ screens. According to Philips’ digital signage staff, commercial-grade displays provide the kind of durability that is very necessary in the 24/7 environments of digital signage applications like the digital concierge.
According to Keywest Technology’s reseller channel manager, Wes Dixon, the digital concierge works in concept much like a smartphone.
Dixon explains, “By using a large 46-inch touch screen in portrait orientation, our creative application works very similar to a smartphone that can pull data in real time, but instead of a bunch of disjointed apps, each icon provides helpful information that assists guests in using the amenities of the hotel and region with ambient data that is useful.”
The digital concierge can run stand-alone on any media player that meets the minimum specifications, and it can be easily controlled via Keywest’s cloud-based Breeze Digital Signage system. In any case, Keywest Technology recommends only the use of commercial-grade displays like the Philips MMD series to withstand the 24/7 service cycle.