Web App Design
Redesigned Hilton’s internal payment hub to streamline workflows, reduce complexity, and support global hotel teams at scale.
COMPANY
Hilton
DURATION
24 Months
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TEAM
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam, UserTesting, Jira, Confluence
OVERVIEW
Hilton’s Enterprise Payment Platform (EPP) is the internal web application hotel staff and corporate teams use to manage payment transactions, credit card authorizations, and refunds. Despite its importance, the legacy system was dense, confusing, and fragmented across multiple databases—making it difficult for users to complete key tasks or even know where to start.
Discovery research uncovered consistent pain points:
Confusing navigation with no unified search or clear hierarchy
Limited visibility into transaction status or next available actions
No onboarding or training materials, creating heavy reliance on engineering
Outdated UI patterns that hindered efficiency, clarity, and trust
The redesign aimed to transform EPP into a modern, intuitive, and self-service platform that gives users confidence, improves data visibility, and scales smoothly across global operations.
GOALS
Streamline navigation and simplify complex workflows
Surface key data and transaction states in a clear, actionable way
Provide structured onboarding and self-service support
Enable faster, unified global search and reporting
Modernize the interface using scalable design patterns aligned with Hilton brand and accessibility standards
As Lead Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end redesign — from information architecture and workflow modeling to interaction patterns and high-fidelity UI. I partnered closely with multiple cross-functional teams to ensure the experience was usable, technically feasible, and scalable across Hilton’s global ecosystem.
Collaborators included:
Engineering: Daily partnership to validate feasibility, align on system architecture, and ensure scalable component implementation.
UX Research: Leveraged foundational insights to guide problem framing, prioritize user needs, and validate design decisions.
UI Design: Collaborated to refine visual design, extend the visual language, and build reusable components used throughout the platform.
Product & Support Teams: Defined core user scenarios, reporting and compliance requirements, and escalation workflows across properties.
We selected Material Design as the foundational system for its robust enterprise-grade components and data-heavy patterns, customizing it extensively to align with Hilton’s internal branding and accessibility standards.
PROCESS
The redesign followed the Double Diamond framework: Discover → Define → Develop → Deliver, balancing deep discovery with rapid iteration and close collaboration.
Discover — Understanding the Problem
The project began with foundational research led by Hilton’s UX researcher. Through interviews and contextual inquiries with hotel staff, we uncovered consistent challenges:
Difficulty locating or interpreting transaction details
No centralized hub for training or troubleshooting
Frequent dependency on engineers for support
These insights helped establish early design principles around clarity, visibility, and self-sufficiency.
Define — Clarifying Scope & Information Architecture
Hilton’s legacy platform structure was fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. I mapped the existing ecosystem and reorganized it into four clear modules — Applications, Reports, Settings, and Search — establishing a logical foundation that simplified navigation and supported long-term scalability.
The EPP Site Map / Progress Map acted as both a visual blueprint and a phased implementation guide, ensuring alignment across product, engineering, and support teams from discovery through launch.
To reduce confusion around transaction logic, I created a Status ↔ Action Framework that mapped each system’s statuses (e.g., Created, Submitted, Refunded) to their permitted actions (Send, Refund, Cancel, Clone). Each status was color-coded, allowing teams to quickly identify items requiring attention and understand what they could do next.
While the example shown reflects Pay by Link, this mapping was created for all four databases — Pay by Link, Payments / Authorizations, SCA / Authentications, and Credit Card Authorizations. This provided a unified mental model across modules, eliminating guesswork around which actions were valid for each transaction state.
Develop — Designing & Iterating Solutions
Building on these foundations, I explored and tested multiple design directions in close partnership with engineering.
Key focus areas included:
Dashboards & Reporting: Designed dynamic dashboards for Pay by Link and Digital Credit Card Authorization, visualizing real-time transaction statuses (successful, pending, expired, failed) and enabling users to generate and export custom reports.
Visibility into transactions was limited in the legacy system. The redesigned dashboards provide real-time insights into Pay by Link and Credit Card Authorizations, surfacing success rates, failures, and pending actions at a glance.
Homepage with Self-Service & Learning Library: The original homepage offered little utility. The redesigned homepage became a centralized command center for reporting, training, updates, and support.
Before: The homepage provided no meaningful value to users.
After: A self-service hub that centralizes reporting summaries, training resources, updates, and direct support—empowering users to troubleshoot independently.
Unified Global Search & Advanced Filters : The legacy search required navigating multiple systems and manually cross-checking results. The new Global Search allows users to search across all databases (Pay by Link, Credit Card Auth, SCA, Payments) with powerful filtering and inline quick actions—dramatically reducing clicks and task time.
Before: Searching across databases required navigating multiple systems and manually checking results.
After: A unified global search allows filtering across all payment types and performing quick actions directly from the results list.
Each design direction went through iterative reviews with internal property teams, enabling rapid refinements grounded in real operational workflows.
DELIVER — FINAL SOLUTION & IMPLEMENTATION
IMPACT
Phased rollout completed in early 2025
Significant reduction in support tickets and training needs
Major improvements in task efficiency, accuracy, and user confidence
Positive feedback from both hotel operations and engineering teams
Established a scalable framework for future Hilton enterprise tools
REFLECTIONS & KEY LEARNINGS
Designing for EPP required balancing dense data structures, complex workflows, and diverse user roles in a single system.
It strengthened my ability to apply systems thinking in enterprise environments while maintaining a human-centered approach.
Through deep collaboration with engineering and research, the redesign transformed EPP from a fragmented, opaque system into a cohesive, intuitive, and empowering enterprise platform that now supports Hilton’s global payment operations at scale.