Post up and work anywhere
Providing remote workers with information on public spaces for easy and accessible workspaces.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
Individual
Duration
1 week
/01 Overview
How might we help remote workers find great places near them to do work from?
PostUp was a personal project structured as a five day design sprint to quickly brainstorm, ideate, and rapid test possible solutions for providing free and easily accessible public workspaces for remote workers.
/02 Constraints
What do we know so far?
PostUp has done research on users after seeing a lot of discussion from remote workers who were asking about finding suitable places to work from. The research led to three main objectives to be met:
/03 Mapping
Understanding the problem
While going over the research provided by PostUp, I noticed that there were three main issues that users were facing.
The need to find a public workspace.
Users need to be able to find a place that is quiet for work, quick meetings, and phone calls. Users often have a lots of time in between meetings that they like to use to get some tasks done.
Wasting too much time searching.
Often times, users are actually spending more time searching for a place to work from rather than actually doing any work. This is often due to them not being familiar with the area that they are in and so it leads to a big waste of time.
Not enough basic amenities.
In order to do remote work comfortably, you need a few basic amenities. For starters, you need decent, reliable wi-fi. You also would want a place that allows you access to restrooms. And lastly, a place that wouldn't require you to buy anything in order to stay. Users were having trouble finding places that would fit those criteria.
/04 Sketching
Gathering inspiration and ideating possible solutions
The second day of the sprint required a lot of brainstorming. Although I'm a naturally creative person, a design sprint definitely pushes your creative thinking to the limit. Because there is a short amount of time in a sprint, you really just have to throw any and all ideas out there and then quickly sort out which ones may work afterwards.
Lightning Demos
A lightning demo exercise allows me to look at multiple apps that are in a similar space or have a similar solution for the problem at hand as inspiration.
Most Critical Screens
I determined that the most critical screen to be developed during this five day design sprint is the explore screen. This would be the screen where users would search for spaces to work at.
Rapid Sketching
During this part of the design sprint, I implemented a brainstorming method known as, Crazy 8s. Essentially, I gave myself 8 minutes to sketch 8 possible designs for the explore screen. With such limited time per sketch, it really made me think on the fly.
Solution Sketch
Once rapid sketching was completed and a solution was chosen from one of the eight sketches, I then moved on to creating a 3-panel sketch of how the app would work.
/05 Storyboarding
What would my user's journey look like?
Creating a storyboard allows me to understand the PostUp journey from a new user's perspective. How will they find the app? How will they interact with it? How easy would it be to use? All questions that I kept in mind when storyboarding. The process of this storyboard would lay out the foundation of how my prototype will look and feel.
/06 Prototyping
Creating an end-to-end user experience in one day.
By taking what I have learned so far and putting it into high-fidelity, I managed to produce a working prototype.
/07 Testing
How will it perform with actual users?
I tested the prototype with five participants on the final day of the sprint. Each participant was a remote worker with varying ages between 24 and 30.
My participants had a lot of feedback to give during this testing session. I noticed that a lot of them felt strongly about the same things. Here are some patterns that were observed:
/08 Post-Project Reflections
What can be improved for the next time?
A design sprint is meant to be used to rapid design and test a possible solution for an existing problem. Working on this sprint allowed me to experience working under an accelerated timeline. It improved my ability to quickly ideate. And mostly, it helped me to improve my focus on one problem at a time.
I believe for the next iteration of PostUp, there should be features that are more advanced or desirable. Right now there doesn't seem to be a place in the market for an app like PostUp when apps like Google Maps already exist—and for free. The next iteration should provide more value to justify the $5.99/month price tag.