Reimagine Employees’ Meeting Space Booking Experience
Context
CBRE - real estate
2 months
Tools Used
Figma
Miro
My Contribution
Research synthesis
Information architecture design
Hi-fi design
Team
Renee Yu, UX Designer
Jackie Slivka, UX Designer
Christian Linsey, Design Director
Business Background
To accommodate flexible work policies, CBRE (Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis) introduced Host Work, allowing employees to oversee their office experiences. However, as more employees return to the office, the application is encountering difficulties in handling the growing volume.
The Challenge
The current application primarily serves back-end analytical requirements, overlooking the crucial aspect of user experience design. Employees are having a hard time grasping the application's overall functionality, resulting in bad office experience.
Product Goals
Design goals:
- Understand current user needs
- Determine design direction that improves the application’s functionality
Business goals:
- Collect office usage statistic
- Adoptable to future application development
My success metrics:
- Research finding results
- Client support on implementations
The Outcome
A redesigned booking flow that reduced the time and number of actions required to find working space by 60% and saved CBRE significantly amount of development cost by incorporating low development effort changes.
The Approach
Research
During the first phase of the redesign, the team deep dived into the application to perform audit and created a heuristic evaluation with each problem space color-coded. We further interviewed 3 employees to better understand their needs and pain points.
Findings
Through our research, we found out that there are 2 different type of users.
A regular employee who would like to have a smooth office experience.
An admin who manages the rooms and collect room booking statistics.
Pain points
As a regular employee:
User do not understand of the meaning behind the app’s functionality due to unclear information architecture
User do no understand the different type of room availabilities due to the lack of UI development
User is having a hard time booking meeting rooms and experiencing unnecessary tap flows to find available desk
As an admin: there is no way to distinguish between spaces that are open for all to use, and spaces that are conditionally available to regular employees
Redesign Main Focus
Utilizing the research findings, the team created a scope chart to prioritize each problem by its development effort and impact. This helps CBRE to understand their problem space and potential development costs associated with it.
For the redesign, we decided to focus on the area that is “High Impact, Low Effort”.
1. The map booking experience
2. UI inconsistency
Ideate
The current application only categorize the room availabilities into 2 status - available and not available. This is causing many confusions because some of the supposed to be ‘available’ space is actually occupied after user arrive to the spot.
With that, we devised a new structure for room status availability that also ensure the backend analytics use of the platform.
Status Availabilities:
A reservable room (direct booking)
Available
Not Available
A non-reservable room (first come, first serve)
Available
Not available
A reservable managed space room (by request)
Available
Not Available
Based on the new structure for room availabilities, we played around with colors and patterns to present each status in a clear and accessible manner.
Design
We delivered 20 redesigned screens that fundamentally changed how Host Work interacts with its employees and communicate a better booking experience. The new booking flow allows users to reserve meeting space on a one-step process.
This includes:
New room status development
Legend development
Feature awareness development
UI alignment
New booking information architecture
New vs. Old Designs
Map overview:
New
Incorporated legend
Clear communication on status of rooms
User can determine availability of rooms on first glance
Admins are now able to keep track on “Managed spaces” without disrupting the user experience
Old
No differentiate between rooms status. Currently everything is categorized between green and grey
UI inconsistency
UX inconsistency
Reservable rooms:
New
Detailed room information
Clear and easy to understand CTA
Direct booking for available rooms
If room is managed by admin, copy is changed to “Request to book”
Old
Unnecessary tap flow - user can’t directly book available rooms
Confusing call to action buttons
Room information is inconsistent and hard to understand
Non-reservable rooms:
New
Detailed room information
Clear and easy to understand CTA
If the room is occupied, there would no primary CTA for booking
Old
Room information is inconsistent and hard to understand
UI inconsistency
UX inconsistency
The Impact
The redesigned booking experience reduced the time and number of actions required to find available space by 60%
Client resonated with the user insights and implemented the redesign prototypes
The redesigned application is adoptable and serve as a reference starting point for CBRE’s new application called Flex