KAYLA FARRELL

WeWork MEETING room booking

Meetings are a key component of the member experience at WeWork, moreover a key activity for any business - type, size, location, etc. As part of the membership offering at WeWork, members gain access to various meeting spaces and are able to reserve meeting rooms via the WeWork app. However, the experience of room booking was not always delightful for members so in 2018, the technology design team decided to change that.

Challenge & Goals

Members reserve meeting rooms via the WeWork app on a daily basis. Anecdotally we knew that the room booking experience was not easy or pleasant; particularly on the mobile app. We set out to fix this by improving the room booking experience to increase member satisfaction and efficiency.

The high level goal was to improve the room booking experience by:

• Increasing member satisfaction (via the Apple App store, Zendesk and anecdotally)

• Decreasing amount of time members spent on booking (time from search to booking)
  

Timeline

This project spanned 6 months from kick off to release. Discovery research was completed within a 2-week timeframe. Validating research was conducted within a 1-week timeframe.

ROLE & CONTRIBUTORS

I worked alongside a senior researcher for the early stages of this project (planning and discovery research). Together we conducted the initial secondary research, early stakeholder interviews and review of current app experience. We worked with a data analyst to gather and analyze existing data about room booking through the WeWork app.

I led user interviews in the discovery phase and later concept and usability testing to validate the final designs. Additionally, I worked closely with Product, Design and Engineering to prioritize design solutions as an advocate for the user.

DISCOVERY RESEARCH

• Exploratory analysis with room booking data from the member app and website

• Review of existing Zendesk tickets, previous survey responses around the member app and prior research

• Discovery interviews with members of varying room booking experience
  

High level research questions

• What is the full meeting planning journey for a WeWork member today?

• What’s working well and what isn’t from a high level perspective and a touchpoint perspective?

• Is there a “best” workflow for planning, booking and hosting meetings at WeWork?

EMERGING INSIGHTS

An interesting emerging theme was the lack of planning of some meetings. Meetings rooms were often booked day-of and in many cases right before the meeting (within minutes!). Members were annoyed that they had to spend any amount of time to differentiate available and booked rooms within the room booking flow and sometimes spent more time searching for a room than even using one.

Observations from research were synthesized into three main chapters with 2-4 actionable insights each:

• Large rooms are booked in advance

• Small rooms are booked spur of the moment

• Members book rooms they’ve previously booked

These insights were shared with design, product and engineering as a presentation. During this share-out, everyone was encouraged to write “How might we statements” as well as questions and ideas that were inspired by these insights.

From this brainstorm, a cost analysis map was created that helped visualize what design challenges should be prioritized based on how feasible it was to build and how impactful it would be for member satisfaction.

This exercise brought a shared understanding across the team cross-functionally and also laid out the roadmap for future opportunities.

evaluative research

An interactive prototype was created and five NY-based members participated in-person in usability testing with an iPhone X. Participants were asked a series of questions and asked to complete specific tasks while providing feedback along the way. High level goals were to learn if participants could:

• successfully book a room with specific criteria

• successfully find and book a room right now

Participants were drawn to the feature and interacted with the slider as intended. Though there were some concepts that did not perform as well, providing members with a way to see and immediately book available rooms was received very positively. This observation alongside corresponding design implications were synthesized and again presented to the entire team.

ImPACT AND IMPLICATIONS

With the findings and design implications from usability testing, the design team refined the designs for room booking experience, handed off to build and on December 10, 2018 the “Open Rooms” feature was released alongside other updates to the WeWork app. In addition to receiving positive feedback anecdotally and through feedback channels, the Open Rooms feature has also saved our members time with each booking (metric not included for confidentiality reasons).