Overview
WeWork has long been the leader in co-working spaces and bringing different businesses and organizations together. They wanted to further their mission by creating a venue for businesses to partner with nonprofits.
Keep reading for more in-depth dive into the case study, or skip to the prototype.
Roles
Tools
Accomplishments
I met with Tim (WeWork Community Manager) and Brooks (WeWork Impact Lead), leaders of WeWork’s new initiative, to find out what they needed to be built into their platform. They gave three stipulations:
My team and I had the unique opportunity to gather personal observations as we were WeWork members ourselves. Based off of my first-hand experience, I initially assumed that WeWork’s collaborative spaces would allow people to easily connect.
To address the brief and put our assumptions to the test, my team and I started off with research. We looked at some other platforms in the market in our competitive analysis to understand the sector we would be stepping into.
These served as models for how businesses and people could connect with nonprofits.
We also conducted domain research to understand who was volunteering and why. The biggest piece of information we pulled from these findings is that people out in the community want to volunteer their time, and even their money, to help and reach out to their community. But we also want to bring it closer to home and discover what people around us at WeWork were doing.
We delved into user interviews to hear it from the WeWork members firsthand. We conducted two rounds. The first round was with three users.
We mapped out all of the data points on an affinity map to help us sort out the common trends and insights from our conversations with users.
We found that all three members were fairly new to WeWork and were active volunteers. They joined for camaraderie and community building. However, they also felt like WeWork’s current online platform lacked activity and curated content tailored to their individual interests. This confirmed our suspicion that despite the number of companies and employees located in WeWork, many of them aren’t active on the online platform.
This led us to create our first persona, Courtney.
After assessing our persona, team and I realized that we needed a fuller picture of WeWork members. Thus, we conducted a second round of interviews. With this group, we were able to introduce some mix to our user group. They scaled a bit on the older end of the spectrum and some of them worked remotely quite frequently.
75% of these users told us that they aren’t currently volunteering, which was quite different from our first user group. We also learned that volunteers need incentives in order to participate, if there were things like free beer or a free t-shirts involved. And lastly, businesses will only reach out to nonprofits when it benefits them, such as getting good PR, because they are more invested in growing their small companies. In fact, we were surprised to learn that a fair number of the people we talked to told us that my team and I were the first ones they have properly connected with in WeWork since they started working here.
After hearing from numerous members, we figured out that the root of problem is really that they aren’t connecting with other members as effortlessly as they had assumed. This led us to our problem statement.
With the problem identified, we crafted four design principles to help guide our process to create potential solutions for our users.
In order to tackle our problem statement and leverage our design principles, we created three divergent concepts to come up with the best solution possible.
From that emerged the creation of mid-fidelity prototypes. Do Good is a website that strives to selectively filter and guide users by partnering with a non profit that suits their interests and schedule while also connecting them to other members with similar passions. I created the checklist for users to keep track of their volunteer items and to help a user like our persona, Dan, who may feel overwhelmed.
Users gave us useful feedback to help us iterate on the website. First, we discovered usability issues around the navigation as some users struggled to discover other members in the network. Secondly, we found although users liked being able to invite coworkers to events, they wished there were more ways to send invitations out.
We recommended three items as next steps for our client:
Given that this was my first client project, there were many things that I learned. This project taught me how to work collaboratively with a small team in an agile environment. I learned to compromise, accept, and give constructive feedback in a way that always pointed back to user data. I also learned to prototype and make iterations rapidly. If there was one thing I could do over again, I would restructure the way our research was conducted. I realized halfway through the project that our team was struggling to pull meaningful insights from the data we had. Had the interview questions probed a bit deeper or we had narrowed our scope early on, we may not have to struggle to reveal a problem. Having said that, I think we did make the right move in conducting a second round of interviews to give us a more accurate picture of our users.
Completing this project set me up for better success in my next project, Bonzah.