PostUp: Design Sprint

DURATION:

1 week

TOOLS:

Adobe XD

ROLE:

Designer: All UX/UI Design

Researcher: All Research

DAY 1: MAP

Current restaurant/coffee shop finding services are simply not catered to those who are looking for a place to do remote work. While they generally offer large amounts of information about an establishment, their ability to provide information specifically useful to those looking to get work done such as WiFi reliability/accessibility, bathroom accessibility, seat availability, physical space, and business level are lacking. PostUp aims to create an affordable membership service to help users who want to work out of an establishment find locations fit for their needs.

INTERVIEW NOTES:

INTERVIEWEE: Chelsea - 32 year old Freelance Graphic Designer.

Chelsea’s current thought process when a workspace:

  1. While libraries good to work out of, they aren’t conducive for calls, so coffee shops are more often than not what she looks for.

  2. Because she lives in New York, she goes straight to the MAP feature as there are a lot of places near her.

  3. She then looks at photos once on a page, because getting an idea of the interior space is important.

  4. She then looks at their hours, specifically the busiest times.

  5. She prefers to see crowdedness by seat availability on an establishment’s details page, as opposed to the amount of people there.

  6. She then looks out for amenities such as WiFi, bathrooms, etc., but often has to go to multiple services to get a full idea. She also dislikes needing to dig through reviews to find them.

  7. She finds it unfortunate that most services are catered to people who want to eat or drink, as opposed to work from.

Based on Chelsea’s interview, I mapped out her her end-to-end experience:

DAY 2: SKETCH

CRAZY 8’S SKETCH:

Considering the PostUp aims to offer functionally similar task flows as Yelp and Google Maps, I took inspiration from their layouts to achieve PostUp’s task goals.

SOLUTION SKETCH:

Based on Chelsea’s user interview, it’s abundantly clear that finding a place to post up is a task best achieved via the map page. It’s because of this I chose it as the most critical screen, and therefore sketched the “Filters” and “Details” page to be accompaniments on the Solution Sketch.

DAY 2: DECIDE

For PostUp’s app, I did not build out every possible interaction a user could have with each screen, just the UI elements involved with interacting with the app to accomplish a task. Because of that, defining the tasks necessary for an MVP was important.

Those tasks are:

  1. Viewing suggested workspaces

  2. Using filters to locate a desirable workspace

  3. Viewing details about a workspace

  4. Writing a review about a workspace

  5. Viewing one’s own profile

  6. Viewing one’s own bookmarks

DAY 4: PROTOTYPE

DAY 5: TEST

USER TESTING DEBRIEF:

As someone who works out of cafes on a daily basis, I decided to predominantly source familiar faced interviewees from the very cafes I work out of. This provided 3/5 interviews, and the remaining 2 were friends I know who also work remotely out of cafes. They were:

  1. Mariam - Freelance Graphic Designer, 27

  2. Michael - Photo Editor, 26

  3. Jennifer - Audio Engineer, 31

  4. Chantal - Copywriter, 29

  5. Luna - Video Editor, 26

There were minimal instances of friction during the testing process to complete the task flows. The main hiccups and preferential changes were:

  1. Users wanted to be greeted with a map view when on the bookmarks tab, while also having the photo previews be large enough to be immediately familiar with a place they’ve most likely already been to (hence them already been bookmarked).

    1. I remedied this by combining the two already made menu styles: the large photo previews in the initial bookmark, and the swipe up list featuring them over the map. This change is reflected in both final screens and prototype.

  2. Users wanted a more robust “business” level on the details page.

    1. I remedied this by displaying full operational hours represented by a bar graph corresponding with anticipated activity levels. This change is reflected in both final screens and prototype.