How might we change employee behavior?
A global company with over ten thousand employees transitioned to newer buildings that have fewer traditional offices, and more community collaboration rooms. They wanted managers with offices to “rent out” their offices when they are traveling or on PTO to other travelers for group meetings. They wanted to give the user the ability to approve a visitor for use of their room, set rules and guidelines for using the room, as well as a rating system for both rooms and visitors.
Role
UX Design
UI Design
Product design
Visual Design
Project Management
Goal
Easily reserved rooms
Design for user context
○ Geolocation
○ Push Notifications
○ Calendar integrationMake approval painless
I created the UI, user flow, visual design elements, and screen layouts for the developers to implement from. I worked directly with the client and did all user-testing for the product.
Planning Phase
Kick Off
At the kick off meeting with the client, I discussed with them at length about their use cases and employee behavior. This company had their own secure email and calendar applications. This app would need to tap into those instead of the built-in apps for these features. Coming out of the meeting, four main goals were identified:
- Reservations of rooms - available and approved
- Location - building and user travel
- Notifications - when reservations and locations overlap, and for approval of reservations
- Gamification - leader boards and point values
Research
I talked directly with employees that travel frequently to discover their biggest problems visiting other offices and validate the established use cases. From this research I create personas and user scenarios necessary for designing the app.
Design Phase
I started out by looking at the apps the client brought up and then branched out into other reservation and planning type apps. What were they doing well? What was required to move through the user stories and get the user to the end goal? What functionality was intuitive and what was causing friction?
I created a wireframe screen flow that had showed all the user scenarios of the app for the client to look over and discuss internally with their team.
Working from the screen flow diagram I started flushing out each main screen for the different sections: navigation, notifications, reservations and hosted space. I created a low-fidelity prototype and walked the clients through it as well as let them play around with it.
Working in an iterative process with the client, I refined the UI and visual design moving the mock up into the high-fidelity stages.
Implementation Phase
With a finalized flow the developers began constructing the various screens in the flow, and with low-fidelity mocks they could start placing the information and test connections with the backend systems. With the completion of the high-fidelity mock-up the developers can put in the final polish to the UI.
Challenges
The client came back with an edge case: they wanted certain people to have the ability to manage multiple rooms.
The problem was not how the user would see multiple rooms. The main problem was how a user went about adding the second room to initiate the room list - this was quite the challenge. I needed to figure out how to minimize the impact on the UI (since the engineers had already implemented the majority of the UI) and the user experience.
This edge case took a lot of thinking and I am happy with the solution to put a small add button on the profile screen to add the initial second room. After the second room is added, the user sees a room list where the add button naturally fits in the top right corner.
Deployment Phase
I did build tests in Xcode and with test flight to audit the new functionality and assets being implemented. I sat down with the developer about improvements and tweaks. I also used these builds to present progress to the client.
The app was released via the company's internal iOS app store. It was well-received and had over 500 beta users within 4 months, and is still growing. I created a video walkthrough to help their orientation and on-boarding process.