Steal this UX framework from Dubai’s most over-the-top hotel

The invisible man at the chocolate fountain

If you have ever used a chocolate fountain, you know the physics. The chocolate is thin. It drips. A child holding a skewer of marshmallows is a guaranteed spill. The counter around one of these should look like a crime scene by nine o’clock.

This one never did. Five ribbons ran at once: pistachio, raspberry, milk, white, and dark, and all week the marble around it stayed spotless. It took me three nights to work out why, and when I did, I realized I had been staring at the best piece of user-experience design in the whole resort. I’ll come back to this observation later.

We had come to Atlantis The Palm for a week, one of the most lavish hotels in the world. If you have never been, a quick word on the place. It is located on the outer crescent of Palm Jumeirah, the artificial palm-shaped island off Dubai you can pick out from space. It is less a hotel than a small city: its own waterpark, its own aquarium, and a strip of restaurants that has quietly become a culinary heavyweight. The wider Atlantis Dubai resort it anchors…