Jason Wang
Upflex App Design
UX/UI Design/2019
With Upfelx
The employers pay for what their employees use, giving their employees the benefits of work location flexibility-whether it is once a week while traveling ,or anytime-is the best way to keep their employees can choose the co-working spaces close to them or where they need to be.
My Role
I was approached for this project by the founder of Upflex, Ginger Dhaliwal.The team had finished the preliminary research and ideation for their mobile application.I was assigned the job to evaluate and create user flow, low&high fidelity wireframe. After the new app rolled out on Both Android and iOS platforms, I applied iterative design to improve the usability of our product and filled the gap between our business goals and user needs.
My Work
Where did I start?
To be honest,I didn’t know how projects were supposed to start. I was a junior product designer, the research information was overwhelming to me,I even didn't know the business strategy of Upflex and why users need the app.As a user's advocate, besides to read the design documents,I believed I need to understand users' feelings and find the proof to convince myself that our app can solve users' real problems.After I visited dozens of co-working spaces in New York and watch how people worked in the spaces, I was aware of the pain that people want to cut the commute and have a workspace close to their home.
Sketch
Although the mobile app design process was similar as the our web app design , we took a large amount of work to design a more user friendly mobile app.After we iterated the research and collected the user feedback , we simplified the user flow in the mobile app and highlighted the feature.To visualize our findings and ideas, we drew the sketch of our mobile app.
Low Fidelity Wireframe
Icon Design
Because of the design consistency across the platforms, we didn't have many choices about the color theme in the mobile app design.We used the same blue color theme that we used in the web design. In order to have better contrast and supports visual hierarchy on the mobile screen , we change the color theme slightly.
Also, we design the office amenity icons for the working spaces in the app to cover users' working needs.We believed icons are the most important visual element in the app. we chose some basic design principles to make them functional intuitive , understandable.
High- Fidelity Wireframe
Make a reservation in a snap
Upflex provides instant workspace access anywhere and anytime, allowing you and your team to work better, happier, and more conveniently.
Make a reservation in a snap
In the app, users don't need to pay for their workspace reservations.Instead of adding the credit cards to their accounts, they pay for the service in Flexpoints , a kind of virtual point that their employers give to them via the Upflex back-end platform. Without any payment functions, the app are simple and friendly for users. Normally, they can finish their reservations within 10s in the app.
Cover all your working needs
In Upflex app, we cover all of users working needs. whether they want to find a space at which they can cook coffee or print some paper files, they can always find the one not only is close to them but make their work more productive Users can search for the workspaces by the amenities ,distance and open time in the app.
In the app, , it is quite easy to adjust your reservations. The users may cancel or change their reservations up to 24 hours before the schedule start time to avoid being charged. What is more significant , after check-in , the users can extend the booking time according to their needs.
The flexibility to adjust your reservation
Fabien Moreau (On The App Store)
"I've been able to access great co-working spaces in various cities with this service. apps works great. And the Upflex team also helped me find quality locations for meetings."
Takeaway
From the project, I learned a major benefit of fast iteration is I also fail fast. Sometimes It is great to Fail fast. It means the company and I can invest less time and money in the things that don't work.Base on the user feedback we collected from the users , we tried out many new features with the rapidly changing interface of our application. Some of new features brought tangible benefits and achieved the certain goal for users but some were experimental and impractical .Fast iteration helps us solve the design problem by giving us a platform on which we can test quickly , helping to collect new data about any outstanding questions instead of resorting to opinionated arguments.
Also ,it was excited to see that how UX design helped Upflex calibrate its business strategy and impacted the customer brand perception .A good customer experience will minimize problems on the business end and build trust with users. The experience that I work at Upfelx gave me chance to understand the whole industry beyond a designer.