Designing a booking experience for a post COVID-19 workspace: UX Case Study
Disclaimer: This is a personal project. I am not, personally or professionally, associated to any of these brands or services mentioned in this story.
Brief 📁
This design prompt was given to me by the design team at Bigbasket.
I came up with my solution called CoWork. I’ll be walking you through the case study, explaining how I went around the problem and came up with a solution.
Prompt 💬
Scenario: Working with teams during pandemic crisis is really challenging. It’s especially difficult for small businesses that don’t have their own space and need to meet with colleagues to make important decisions. It’s tough for co-working spaces to adhere to the COVID-19 standards when the clients book a room without adhering to COVID-19 protocols.
Objective: Create a booking experience for a conference room in a co-working space that takes into account the current COVID-19 situation.
Research 🧐
My first step to understanding the problem was to learn as much as possible about co-working and rented office spaces. This involved me researching journals regarding COVID-19 guidelines and protocols.
I also had to look at how the existing co-working office booking applications work and how I can improve upon that. I had a look at WeWork and see how to make the application relevant in a post COVID workspace time.
Some stuff I want to improve in the existing applications
- Less to no emphasis on the current pandemic.
- Not keeping the user in touch with the existing rules or guidelines which might make consumers feel cheated once they’ve paid for the service and find out certain features/amenities are not available.
- Most business is transferred to outbound enquiries and actual visits. Having AR visit rooms to view the workspaces virtually adds a lot to the user experience.
Sitemaps and structure the application
After brainstorming few propositions and ideas, I stuck with this solution. The application keeps the user informed about the COVID-19 guidelines, informs about no service due to the regulations and approving or ranking workspaces that are COVID-19 approved by the brand first so as to mitigate the risks involved in co-working.
(I apologize for my bad drawing/writing in the image)
The structure involves the user to go from Search → Explore → Book → Pay which provides a smooth interaction for those users that don’t want to be distracted by the peripherals such as enquiring, calling and visits although there are options available to do the same as well.
Wireframes
Some of the few things that I took care of here was,
- Provide 3D walkthrough of the workspaces so that people can schedule visits only at cases they are very sure about the workspace that they are looking to rent, thereby increasing the success of the interactions and reducing the logistical effort.
- Why Whatsapp enquiries? Whatsapp is the most widely used instant messaging service in India. Using other mediums like in-house text or emails will just make it difficult for the user to not miss it.
- Badges to show the approval of the workspace in terms of COVID-19 guidelines for keeping the consumers safe.
- Ensuring social distancing by minimizing the density of people per workspace by setting a lower maximum capacity.
- Explicitly show the guidelines to keep the user informed and updated about the COVID-19 regulations and confirming that they’ve read and agreed to the same.
Final Designs
Visual Design, Logo and Typography Standards
Screens
There’s still a lot of improvements I can think of. But given the short time, I couldn’t complete all of it. But I hope to keep editing and iterating on this solution and make this into a complete solution.
Also if you want to look at the Figma prototype: