PostUp

An app that helps remote workers find places to get work done

Overview

Role

User experience
User interface
User testing

Team

Solo designer with mentorship from senior designer

Timeline

1 week (modified design sprint)

Tools

Figma

Background

PostUp is a startup that wants to help remote workers and freelancers find places to work from. They provided a few requirements for the project – they want to focus on existing public places and they plan to charge users a monthly fee to use the product.

The problem

Finding the right place to work from can be a time-consuming process – taking away valuable time from a worker’s busy day.

The goal

Help remote workers easily find good places to get their work done.

Day 1: Understand

Research learnings

Research data was provided in the form of interview quotes and recordings with remote workers. After spending some time going through them, I uncovered 2 main pain points:

Lack of centralized, relevant information

Many existing place listings (on apps such as Google Maps or Yelp) do not focus solely on workability aspects, so workers have to sift through various photos, reviews, and highlights to find relevant information.

Multiple types of information needed

In order to decide on a place to work from, workers often need several types of information to assess the place, such as amenities offered, noise levels, crowdedness, and layout.

Map

With my research findings in mind, I mapped out what the user’s experience looks like when searching for a place to work from. Creating the map allowed me to understand the overall user journey before I hone in on specific points to identify pain points and opportunity areas.

I decided that filtering and browsing results would be the target area to focus on for the sprint. It was important to get this point in the journey right because it’s where the user is provided with more relevant and narrowed down search results in order to decide on a place to work.

So, how might we help workers spend less time looking for places and more time working?

Day 2: Ideate & sketch

Considerations

Because PostUp wants to charge a monthly fee for users to use the product, I had to take into account some important considerations:

  • How do we motivate users to pay a monthly fee?
  • How do we make a solution stand out among free alternatives?
  • How do we build an experience that benefits both the users and PostUp?

I made the assumption that PostUp would partner with businesses to offer its users perks and benefits. After brainstorming some possible benefits, I decided that the member perks would be access to discounts on food and drink items and community events. The benefits – users are able to save money and build connections with other remote workers.

Sketching ideas

I then sketched out different ideas for the filter and browse screens. Because I’d learned from user research that the process of finding a place to work from can be time-consuming, I wanted to explore how I can reduce that amount of time being spent.

My solution focused on allowing users to save a set of filters as their preferred filters in which they can toggle in and out of whenever they wish. This reduces the need to have to manually enter their preferences each time users want to find a place – saving both time and effort. I also added in the discount perk with “PostUp Partners”, or the businesses that PostUp have partnered with.

Day 3: Decide

Day 3 was spent fleshing out my solution idea so that I have a better understanding of the user flow and what parts were necessary for prototyping and testing. I took the previous day's solution sketch and expanded it into a storyboard with additional screens. 

Because my solution focuses on the preferred filters functionality, I wanted my storyboard to address how the app would look and behave during the following scenarios:

  • When the user has not set up their preferred filters yet
  • When the user has set up their preferred filters
  • When the user has to make changes to their preferred filters

Day 4: Prototype

To bring my storyboard screens to life, I created my prototype in Figma.

Day 5: Test

I tested my prototype with 6 participants to gather first impressions, thoughts, and feedback. My goals for the testing were to understand how participants interacted with the preferred filters functionality and to learn whether this is a product they were willing to pay a monthly fee for.

Some learnings –

  • After selecting filters, users want to first view the results before committing to saving them.
  • Users would like to see more information on the perks that are included with the monthly fee and what exactly a PostUp Partner entails.
  • Users knew to look at the filter tags to see what filters were applied, but did not interact with them to remove filter options.

Final solution

Set up preferred filters

Save the preferences that you use most often when searching for places to work

Access exclusive PostUp benefits

Get discounts and perks when you go to places that are PostUp Partners

Learn about different places to work from

View important and relevant details about places when deciding where to work

Learnings

The importance of scope

Because the design sprint had a limited timeline, it was crucial to have a clear understanding of the problem I was solving and the goal I was working towards. Having this understanding helped me focus on what was most important for the scope of this project.

Prioritizing both user needs and business needs

This project challenged me to consider how things would work from both the user side and the business side. By thinking about user goals and success metrics from the beginning, I was able to make design decisions that address both sides.