Remote Workers' Pocket Companion

Project overview

What's the problem?

PostUp, a small startup that caters to freelancers & remote workers, initially launched as a basic mobile app that allowed its users to share tips and advice related to their remote-first lifestyle.

They were increasingly seeing user interest and getting feedback around needing a tool to help them actually locate public places to conduct their work from: digging through internet forums, scanning Google Maps and sifting through reviews, and taking arduous manual steps to try to find a suitable remote work location just wasn't cutting it anymore.

The challenge I was tasked with solving within a swift, 5-day design sprint was finding and designing a solution that PostUp could implement to help their users quickly and effectively find public spaces local to them where they can work remotely.

The solution

I designed a location-based tool that:

• Allows PostUp users to search for remote work locations using targeted filters, all within the app
• Displays reviews for each possible remote work location, imported from third parties like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor
• Gives users the option to save their preferred remote work locations and preferences within a "Favorites" library

Day one - Understand & map

Research review

At the start of the project, I was provided with the existing research data PostUp had so I could gain a clearer understanding of the problem space we were working within.

Some of the most insightful data came from a round of discovery interviews that was conducted prior to the start of this project, and I found the answers to one interview prompt especially noteworthy as I prepared to imagine a solution: Tell us about your experience finding a place to conduct remote work.

"If a place has WiFi, outlets, and bathrooms, that's all I need. If I need to buy some food or coffee to stay there, I really don't mind. Bonus points if their coffee and food are actually good!"

"I like to know how crowded a place is- If I'm doing independent work, I don't want it to be super loud. If I'm meeting clients or coworkers there, I want to be sure we get a place to sit and talk for a bit."

"I usually look at pictures of the place before I go, just to make sure there's enough room for me and my coworker to take a table without feeling guilty."

After reviewing all of the interview highlights, I pulled some common themes and shared sentiments that would inform my next steps:

1) Not knowing a location's hours of operation and most popular (i.e. most crowded) times to visit is a major pain point,
2) Noise levels are a concern for many remote workers, especially those who frequently take meetings, and
3) Accommodations within a business like outlets, reliable WiFi, and bathrooms are important to users and ideally are known ahead of time.

Persona

Based on all of this user research, I created one primary persona to represent PostUp's average end user.

Story mapping

At this point, I had a much clearer understanding of what the problem is and who I'm solving for.

Now, I could really jump in and imagine how the end-to-end solution flow might look. I took to pen and paper to visualize each step in the process of completing the most critical task: efficiently and easily finding a space to conduct remote work.

Recruiting future test participants

Looking ahead to the last day of the sprint, I made it my goal to recruit five participants by the end of day one to take part in a brief usability test to validate my solution design. This way, I could feel secure knowing I wouldn't need to scramble to find users to test the solution on the day-of. It also meant I would get genuine, immediate user feedback to evaluate the solution and bring that back to PostUp.

Through email outreach to a pool of contacts that met my criteria (i.e. generally align with my persona's profile), I successfully scheduled 5 usability tests on the final day of this sprint.

Day two - Sketch

Lightning demos

To kick off day 2, before I began to sketch out possible solutions, I conducted a speedy 25-minute round of lightning demos (i.e. I found three existing products that solve the problem I identified the day before).

I reviewed WeWork, Remoters.net, and WorkFrom as the top existing solutions, since each of these companies aims to help their users find resources and reliable workspaces local to them.

However, none of these solutions successfully addresses the entirety of the problem space that freelancers and remote workers face: these existing companies only solve one part of the bigger problem. Still, these seemed to be the best existing solutions on the market at the time.

Crazy 8's exercise

Next, in order to begin truly visualizing the workflow, I conducted a "Crazy 8's" exercise: I chose one critical screen from the flow I mapped out on day one, then spent 8 minutes quickly sketching 8 different versions of that screen to rapidly ideate and land on an ideal solution design.

The screen I determined to be most critical was the point where a user selects their workspace preferences, since that decision point will guide the subsequent experience.

Solution sketch

I reviewed each of my quick sketches and decided to combine different elements of several screens to create a an optimized low-fidelity sketch of the solution flow.

I sketched out this improved version of the critical screen, along with the screens that come before and after.

Day three - Storyboard

Day three consisted primarily of imagining and sketching out the full user workflow of successfully finding a suitable place to work remotely for the day. The experience was designed to both help the user find accommodations that suit their needs, and also to consider where they want to find those accommodations.

In this new design, the user can search for their ideal workspace either in the vicinity of their current location, or they can choose to search within an entirely different location if that is what they need. I also wanted to make sure that users could compile and save the locations that best meet their preferences so they could reference them quickly in the future if needed. So, I designed a "favorites" screen where the users can access their saved places and preferences.

Day four - Prototype

With a simple yet effective flow drawn out, and with confidence in my solution, I transferred the sketches to a digital setting to create a high-fidelity prototype within Figma.

Because of the time constraints of this sprint, this prototype was created in just one day and centers around the five screens produced on day three. Even within these limits, I produced an effective model of how the experience would truly look and feel as a real product, to the real end-user.

Day five - Test

On the final day of the sprint, I facilitated the 5 usability tests that I scheduled earlier in the week.

Each participant received the following two prompts & tasks to complete:

1)
Scenario: You're in need of a location to work remotely for the day in Richmond, VA, and you're signed in to your PostUp account.
Task: Find a location in Richmond, VA where you can work remotely for the day.

2)
Scenario: You have used PostUp to find workspaces in the past, and after having good experiences with some of the locations you found, you saved them to your account for future reference.
Task: Since you've forgotten the address and opening hours for your favorite location, go back and find that information in the app.

Key insights

The solution was generally very well received, and users did not run into any experience-breaking issues during their interactions. Several users commented on the clarity and quality of content, indicating that this would be a useful service to them if it was available.

I came away from these tests with two main insights:

• 4/5 test participants did not adjust their preferences or search filters until after they chose a location and looked through the photos, tags, and reviews
• Users would have benefited from seeing some sort of visualization of how crowded or busy a location is at different hours of the day, similar to how Google displays this information

Reflection

In just one week, not only was I able to ideate and design this solution, but I was also able to validate it with real target users; this meant that PostUp would gain hugely valuable data and a solution that they could bring to life for their users, without investing much time or money into the process.

Next steps

I plan to do further usability testing to continue trying to discover the most intuitive way to encourage users to input their preferences, and I'd also like to incorporate a "busiest times" element to each selected location's screen so the user can best make their decision about where to work.