OVERVIEW

Goal

Design the end to end experience for Worksphere, a software tool that helps companies manage a hybrid workplace where employees choose whether to work from the office or from home.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has redefined the way people work. Adapting to a mostly remote style of working has given employees flexibility but it has also deprived them of the collaborative and social aspects of going into the office. Employers realize that in the post pandemic world employees will prefer a hybrid work style; between being physically in-office for collaborative work and being remote for when they need the flexibility.

Problem

  • Supporting the new reality of a hybrid work model requires new tools that will help businesses provide their employees with ways to manage in-office time, have visibility into which team members are going to be in office and coordinate in-person meetings. 

  • These tools don’t already exist, as this problem is still relatively new and new needs are emerging as time passes.

Users and Needs

The primary users are Facilities / Office managers of businesses. 

  • Bringing people back to the office safely is the top priority

  • Most offices would like a way of knowing how many employees are in the office/floor etc.

  • Most offices would like to create employee schedules

Employees of the businesses - are secondary users. 

  • They will create schedules, respond to email notifications and calendar invites

MY ROLE

I was the sole Product designer hired to conceptualize and design the end to end experience of the entire product from scratch. I was responsible for: 

  • Creating an Information architecture that would map to the Office manager’s mental model. 

  • Designing all core features and their multiple sub features

  • Establishing a visual design language and setting up the design system

  • Planning user interviews and creating clickable prototypes to gather insights

  • Iterating on design ideas after considering user inputs and engineering constraints

  • Producing high fidelity mocks as deliverables to developers

PROCESS

Research

  1. Discovery Research

A research study was conducted by the founders which included a qualitative interview and an early concept walkthrough. The objective was to understand how businesses were planning their return to offices, what their primary needs might be and how they resonated with early concept explorations. The founding team also conducted an extensive market competition analysis and SWOT analysis with direct and overlapping competitors. 

A product requirements document was crafted based on these early findings with the understanding that the team would be nimble and adapt to learnings in future product evaluations as the product started taking shape.

2. UX Competitive + Comparative Analysis

After going through all of the early research findings, market competition analysis and getting a high level understanding of the product requirements I decided to conduct an analysis of the user experience of direct competitors identified by the founding team. In addition to this I also conducted a comparative analysis with products that were not necessarily direct competitors but offered a portion of the feature set that Worksphere aimed to provide. The aim of this exercise was to understand the product flow of competitor products and to create an inventory of ux patterns used. Overall I looked at 16 products, captured around 250 screenshots and categorized them into feature based groupings. This gave me a good baseline for patterns either repetitive or unique that different competitors had used in their solutions.

 
 

 DESIGN

User flow

  1. To understand the potential steps an office manager would take to complete primary tasks I created user flow diagrams to map out the journey, decision points and inputs they might need to complete their tasks.

Some of these primary tasks were :

  • Setting up the office/organization in Worksphere

  • Adding all the employees into Worksphere

  • Creating calendar schedules for employees to come into the office

Administrator’s Proposed Flow

 

Scheduling Employees Flow

 

Core Features Design

  1. Onboarding and Setup

My primary focus while conceptualizing the design for Worksphere was to make sure that the facilities manager knew how to clearly progress through the product at all times.

I achieved this by creating an onboarding experience in which they add the organization’s information, floor and seat details, upload floor plans, set people capacity limits as decided by their organization and import their employee details into the system. Since this was a multi-step process, it was important to focus on orienting them on where they were and giving them clear explanations on the inputs expected from them to get their organization set up.