‍

Project Overview

With the ongoing pandemic and work responsibilities slowly shifting to online environments, this raises the issue of finding suitable places for workers and students to zoom in on or focus on their work. While many individuals choose to work in the comforts of their homes, this comes with many issues such as difficulty with focusing, distractions from housemates, or needing to meet up with clients or coworkers occasionally in person. This app hopes to mitigate and solve this issue helping workers and students efficiently find their new favorite work places.

‍

‍

‍

User Happy Path Showcase

This User happy path showcases both how the app would react in an ideal situation and how it will help users to find suitable places.

‍

Use the map efficiently is important for users. Also adjust the filters based on their needs.

‍

Filter out the places quickly and shows on the map. The workplace page should have more details.

‍

Workers can choose either individual meet or group meet based on their preferences.

‍

Filtering a desired workplace based on users and their workmates' filters. Auto-generated best-fit choices between their location can make the meeting much easier and more efficient.

‍

Share your favourite places with your workmates is important for interactions and connections.

‍

Check out your friends's recommendation simply! The app will guide you there through connecting to GoogleMap.

‍

You would not miss any meeting! All events are shown on the calendar of your profile page.

‍

‍

1.0 Research walk through

‍

1.1 Problem Statement

There are many people who study or work alone but they want a place that has a study atmosphere where many people study or work together. However, they don’t know how to find such a place so they need to either go to the library which is too crowded or a coffee shop which is too noisy.

Target user: Our target users will be free workers, students in college or just graduated. They can represent people who are working with laptops and working remotely during the pandemic. They may be tired working alone in their house so they want to find a place that has a working environment.

Technology: We will be using an app to locate study/work areas available nearby. Users can find a place to work/study filtering Wifi connections, spots availability, food/drinks availability etc. Since the target users are people in the workforce or studying, we are hoping for them to be technologically proficient.

1.2 Secondary Research

‍

‍

1.3 User Research

The research includes several different components: Interviewed, observed our potential users, and synthesized our findings; Created provisional and polished personas; Created a user journey map for our users.

These research methods allowed us to understand our users, empathize with them, and identify a design problem.

‍

‍As the first step, we conducted semi-structured interviews with some students and faculty of UW as our primary users. This application could help them find empty places on campus to study or work. We conducted with four participants: two UW students and 2 workers of UW and asked them about various aspects.

The research helped us better understand our users and helped us begin defining a problem we wanted to design for.

‍

‍

1.4 Key Insights

‍

2.0 Design

‍

‍

‍

2.1 Personas

Based on our research and synthesized our ideas, we have created two archetypal representations of our users. We have first briefly decided the basic aspects such as the goals, pains, desires, and tach use with the bio of the user. Then we sketched out the draft of the personas and polished the personas for us to better understand our users and to focus our project on their specific attributes.

2.2 Journey Map

We used one of our personas: Claire to create the user journey map to detail her emotions, experience, and thoughts throughout her process of finding a workplace outside her home. This journey map is based on both our user interview and assumption, it helped us identify the user's feelings that we could better design for.

2.3 Scenario Storyboards ‍

Storyboarding is a key component of designing and conveying a user experience. Storyboards can be used in both the formative stages of the design process, by conveying current issues or experiences that users may have, or during the summative phase to evaluate ideas and contexts of a new idea.  Because paper prototypes and sketches cannot often convey the experience of the design in use, narratives such as scenarios and storyboards help convey the experience of design ideas.  Thus, they are essential to user experience design.

2.4 Information Architecture

Information architecture focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way.  The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.  To do this, we figured out to understand how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture, how items relate to each other within the system. The complete functionality of our application is represented, and the visual organization of these features helped us to design the various navigation paths for the user through the application.

3.0 Prototype

In the prototype phase, we followed our design principle and developed them into low-fidelity prototype to express our ideas. Then, we use our lofi prototype to do user testing to confirm and elaborate our ideas. After the user testing, we evaluate our testing result and form evaluation findings. Based on our findings, we do annotated wireframes to highlight our features. Then, based on our findings, we finished our high-fidelity mock-up.Prototyping allowed us to test the usability of our application.

‍‍

3.1 Low-fidelity prototype

‍

Drafting our Design‍

We use Figma to develop the paper prototype. Each page in our information architecture became a screen in our prototype. Our prototype focused on three completion user flows: searching for restaurants with filters, writing and view reviews, and setting up a meeting location. We create these low-fidelity prototypes to test whether our design has problems. To identify our application meets the users' needs, we conduct four user tests to testing our ideas

‍

3.2 User Testing

The low-fidelity prototype was used to conduct user testing with four participants. This study was conducted in order to test three points: usability of our application, users' expectations and behaviors, and whether our application meets users' needs. We changed some features of our application based on users' feedback and our observations. Then, we make a wireframe and changed our features.

‍

3.3 Changes based on User Testing

‍

‍

‍

‍

4.0 Final Deliverable

‍

WhereWork is an app that help workers and students to find suitable places to work. WhereWork is designed to set a all in one workplace finder which helps users to meet much more efficiently.

‍

‍