UX Research

User research provides an essential foundation for design strategy. It helps to create an optimal product for users. Most importantly, we will have the data to change the current business model and make design decisions. User research also helps to identify who would use our product. Key appropriate UX research methods which we can use during a project are:

Learn – Determine what is relevant for users.

Interpret – Examine how to address all users’ needs.

Ideate – Evaluate your designs.

Experiment – Prototyping and validation lowers the risk of project failure by keeping the designs rooted in human-centered testing.

Evolve - The design artifacts provide context, and enable the development team to empathize with end users.

Surveys and interviews

To find out what hypothesis is relevant for users, we conducted surveys and in-depth interviews. The target audience is very diverse, including businessmen and businesswomen, IT specialists, medical specialists who often participate in conferences, and similar groups and we got the next respondents' insights:

89% from Europe, and 11% from India.

Rent an office space for working, business, and meeting with customers and some respondents say that working in an office space helps to build networking.

45% use mobile devices, 45% of respondents use laptops/PC and 10% of respondents use equally mobile and laptops/PC.

90% said that mobile application is more comfortable.

100% use search filters and the most important were named: location, price, security, size, number of people in the office, availability of the office equipment for presentations, a cafe presence, and accessibility for less mobile groups.

60% changed the interface language to their native language if English is selected automatically at the beginning.

77% said that attractive interface design is really important when they book office space.

For the question ''Does the visual attractiveness of the interface affect your trust in the service?'' 56% of respondents said ‘’Yes’’, 22% of respondents said ‘’Maybe’’ and 22% said ‘’No’’.

56% of respondents choose Referral Program as the most interesting bonus program, 33% choose Cumulative Programs and 11% named other programs.

Personas

The field of user experience centers is the idea that we must design products around people, rather than teach them how to use the products: user-centered design (UCD). In order to do that, we must understand people—their behaviors, attitudes, needs, and goals. Whether the final product is a website, software application, or mobile app, a user-centered design can only be achieved if we know who is going to use it and if that knowledge informs our design.

Personas is another tool that can be used to encourage decisions based on real person’s needs.

Journey map

The next step in our research is a journey map: it is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with the user’s thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative.

Our goals in creating journey maps:

Facilitate common understanding;

Identify gaps in customer experience (CX);

Explore opportunities.

Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis is one of the many valuable steps during the ideation process. A competitive audit is an overview of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. That knowledge will carry into your designs and help you create a product that’s helpful and unique for users.

Competitive audits can offer many benefits:

• Giving an idea of products already in the market and their designs.

• Suggest ideas to solve early problems that you’re facing with designs.

• Revealing the ways that current products in the market are not meeting users’ needs. This is a gap for your product to address.

• Demonstrating the expected life cycle of a product in the same market as yours.

• Informing all the different iterations your product could take and how those performed for your competitors.

So I researched our competitors by General information, First impressions, Interaction, Visual Design, and their Content. I found 4 direct and 2 indirect competitors. For such distribution, I took the basic requirement that booking office space must be a short-term rent. Peerspace offers renting from 1 or 4 hours (depending on the office), Regus and Hubble offer renting from 1 hour, WeWork - from 1 day, and Workthere and Skepp - from 1 month.

Most of them are welcoming and easy to use, visually attractive, except Skepp. Their interface needs improvement, because of the outdated interface style. Regus, Hubble, and WeWork have a mobile application for Apple and Android. Peerspace has a mobile application, but only for Apple.

Interaction analysis showed that all competitors have almost the same functionality. I also realized that it is important to pay attention to the user flow and navigation in our future product. This was something that confused me while I was looking for office space. And about Accessibility: I found out that 4 out of 6 competitors had translated their products into different languages. And Workthere is available in 7 currencies.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.

Structure of information architecture lists system entities and communicates their relationships within the application. It provides the vision for system size and scoping activities.

User Flow

The main point here is that the user should register only when he book an office, everything else should be available to him even without registration on the site.