As a kid in the 1980s, Paul Weaver mcreated pen-and-paper role-playing games for a small circle of friends and designed adventure games on his home computer, taking their feedback and improving the experience as they played.
As the video game industry grew more complex, he began mapping out commercial games to understand how their different parts fit together and shaped the experience when playing them.
He had no idea that this curiosity would lead to an international career spanning some of the world's best-known names in entertainment, education and hospitality, including Nintendo, Sony, Marvel, Disney, Rosetta Stone and Hyatt Hotels .
Today, as Vice President of Global Digital Product Design at Hyatt Hotels he leads teams shaping digital experiences for guests, members and colleagues across Hyatt's global portfolio, including web, mobile, loyalty and booking.
"While the setting has changed, my fascination with how people move through an experience, and whether it delights or frustrates them, has stayed the same," he tells CX Network.
As he joins the CX Network Advisory Board, Weaver talks to us about:
- The curiosity that drew him to product design
- How he designs for people across different industries
- The best professional advice he has ever received
- The customer behaviors that influence his work
- And what interests him most in CX today
CX Network: What first attracted you to a career in product design?
Paul Weaver: I started designing experiences long before I knew it could be a career. As a kid in the 1980s, I was absorbed in computer adventure games as well as making my own pen and paper role-playing games. I shared them, let people play together and watched what happened. Where did they go? What did they try that I hadn't anticipated? Which rules helped them have a good time, and which ones left them frustrated? I loved getting an idea out of my head and seeing it come alive for someone else.
As games grew more complex, from the ZX Spectrum era through to Nintendo, I started taking them apart in my head. I mapped them out, wrote guides to beating them, and tried to understand why they worked (or didn't!). What started as a hobby became paid work when Future Publishing asked me to write tips for Total!, Gamesmaster, Sega Power and Super Play! magazines. That work gave me the portfolio I needed to join Rare/Nintendo; I started in QA, which was an extraordinary education in design and software development, before earning the chance to co-design Donkey Kong Country 3.
By the time I'd finished my career in games as creative director of Disney Epic Mickey and studio director of Junction Point, I felt I'd accomplished what I wanted to there, and I was curious whether everything I'd learned would transfer to other kinds of products.
Quite by chance, I had the opportunity to join Rosetta Stone and help lead its children's education work. The setting changed, but my fascination with how people move through an experience, and whether it delights or frustrates them, stayed.
CX Network: How would you describe your approach to product and user design?
Paul Weaver: Before I design an experience, I want to understand what success means to the person having it, and that changes with every industry and every product you work on. A short stint on a basketball game brought it home for me personally... I didn't know much about basketball and certainly couldn't play it, so I had to learn quickly from people who did. The rules and player statistics had to be right, of course, but they also had to make sense to fans of the sport, who would know instantly when we'd missed something important; I couldn't rely on my own instincts to tell me what mattered most.
At Rosetta Stone, our work in children's education gave me a chance to bring in what I knew about games, but here the educators and the pedagogy had to lead. Rewards, visual effects and animation could make learning inviting and even fun, but they couldn't replace the building blocks of learning.
Later, when we rethought the mobile language app, we began with a more personal question: Why do you want to learn another language? The answer helped us design for someone's aspirations, not just a better sequence of lessons.
At Cerner, I learned that a small moment of confusion could have an outsized impact; clinicians had to trust what they saw, because a wrong decision might affect a patient's care.
At Hyatt, understanding context takes another form. Someone booking a room may be planning a business trip, a family holiday or a celebration; I want the digital experience to help them choose with confidence, while giving colleagues what they need to make their work easier and care for our guests and members. Research keeps us close to those different moments and helps us understand what good design needs to do in each one.
CX Network: What is the best professional advice you have ever received?
Paul Weaver: When I started designing levels at Rare, I brought years of playing games, going back to Pong, Astro Wars and 3D Monster Maze, and was so excited to make them that I started building challenges I'd enjoy myself.
Hearing about our QA team's struggles showed me how much knowledge I had taken for granted. It was at this point that Tim Stamper, one of Rare's founders, sat me down and said: "Paul, you're not making these levels for you, you're making them for other people who have a very different skill set; you need to help them both learn how to play the game and enjoy themselves while they're doing it."
That advice changed the way I thought about difficulty, because the player's learning curve had to become part of the level design itself.
We had a rule that a new mechanic needed at least 20 possible uses before it earned a place, and it pushed us to think beyond the initial idea and consider how players would discover it, grow comfortable with it and eventually be surprised by what they'd learned.
In the level with the jumping spiders I designed, we first invited players to land on a spider's back, then gave them room to grow comfortable with that idea; later, a blocked path turned it around and asked them to time a run underneath one. By the end, they understood both possibilities and could judge the next encounter for themselves. That's kishōtenketsu in miniature: introduce an idea, develop it, give it a twist, then let the player bring what they've learned together.
These days we might call Tim's point "you are not your user," but hearing it from him while looking at levels that people were struggling to enjoy made it stick; I still think about it whenever my own familiarity with a product makes something seem easier than it will to someone new.
CX Network: Which customer behaviors have the greatest influence on your work?
Paul Weaver: I've learned to pay close attention to the habits people barely notice in themselves; when you've used a system long enough, even its quirks become part of how you get through your day.
When I worked in the civil service, I used an old green-screen computer for an ordering system that was hardly anyone's idea of an elegant experience, yet I knew precisely how many times to press Tab before entering each piece of information and could make my way through it almost on autopilot. If someone had replaced it without watching me work, they might have made the screen "look" better, or even added mouse controls, while taking away the rhythm that made it usable for me, which is why I'm so interested in the habits people carry with them when a system changes.
That became especially important at Cerner, where clinicians might cross five or more applications in a single task, each with a different information structure and visual language; from their point of view, though, it was one continuous journey, and every change in the way the software looked or behaved asked them to stop and reorient themselves. In an early test we aligned the visual design of one journey without moving a button or changing an interaction, and completion improved while people described the software as faster and of higher quality.
I've carried that learning to Hyatt through Bellhop, our design system, and Canvas, our property website platform. Across thousands of property sites, we make the actions people rely on feel familiar while leaving room for each brand to tell its own story, because recognizing the next step can be as important to a guest as recognizing the place they're visiting.
CX Network: What do you think is the most interesting thing happening in CX right now?
Paul Weaver: Over the past year, the speed at which AI has changed the work my teams do has surprised me, even after a career spent watching technology reshape how we design and build.
We can now turn an idea into a deep interactive prototype in days rather than weeks, and engineering teams are seeing similar gains; that gives us more chances to explore, bring customers into the conversation sooner and discover what works before we have committed months of effort.
I find that exciting, because the creative possibilities are opening up at exactly the moment when people expect more from every experience.
It also makes me think harder about what we call progress. Customers don't see the extra features we were able to ship or the time we saved in production; they feel the whole journey, including the handoffs, the moments of uncertainty and the effort required to get something done.
As AI lets us make more things more quickly, strong research, accessible patterns, security and the willingness to trust experienced people's judgment about that wider context matter even more; otherwise we may simply get better at making the wrong thing faster.
The part I'm most interested in is whether we can use that speed to learn as well as to make: how quickly can we tell whether an experience actually helped, why it helped and what we should improve next?
Quick links
- VIDEO: Paul Weaver on the ROI of UX and CX, and the business value of user-centered design
- Meet the Board: Montserrat Padierna of Walmart on boosting CX with customer insights
- Meet the Board: Ebrahim Hyder on building a customer-centric call center at Michael Kors