A mobile app to boost office experience

Сollaboration with Lassila & Tikanoja to create a concept that meets L&T's needs and increases its customer satisfaction

The project background

More than a year has passed since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Many have made the sudden shift to working from home. Continuous online meetings became new normal. Future of the offices looks uncertain.

The purpose of Experience designer specialization is to respond to the challenge of the named commissioner and to create an experiential prototype(s) as a solution to the given challenge. The design thinking approach is utilized to design a meaningful wow-experience for the given target group. The next step was to implement a planned concept for a commissioner.

Our assignment was given to us by our commissioner, Lassila & Tikanoja, a service company with business operations in four divisions: Environmental services, Industrial services, Facility services Finland, and Facility Services Sweden.

Their goal for the future of offices is to increase the utility rate of office buildings, bring people back to the office after Covid-19 and figure out how to make a safe and comfortable office space and what can be done in addition to the services they already provide. They want to provide the best customer experience with a unique service offering, increase customer satisfaction and drive business growth.

Summary

I learned how it feels to work for a real company. My strong skills in managing my own work and "can-do" attitude helped me to perform my individual responsibilities. Besides the shared responsibilities I was accountable for direct communication with L&T customers, turning data into insights and creating a user interface in Figma. The result was the user-friendly and intuitive high-fidelity prototype of a mobile app that meets our commissioner’s needs and increases customer satisfaction. My ability to understand user needs and convert insights into value helped me to create a customer-centered solution.

Prototype

Goals

Put in practice the 5 stages of design thinking in a real customer project
Gain understanding on our target group -> find and frame the problem of the target group -> brainstorm and come up with possible solutions
Create a solution that meets our commissioner’s needs and expectations and increases customer/user satisfaction
Improve teamwork by previously gained knowledge and experience and communicating and working together
Develop our competencies and become more aware of our own strengths and weaknesses

Our team interviewed stakeholders via Zoom

Empathizing

To get an empathetic understanding of the problem we try to solve first we will interview our contact person. We started with gathering insights by interviewing our networks of office workers, and by the help of our commissioner we got in contact with their customers.

Most of our interviewees have been working from home for the last year. They have become very comfortable in their home-offices, so our biggest challenge was to create a solution for people to return to the office after the pandemic is over.

Our main target was to focus on the differences from working at home and working from the office and create a solution to fulfill all needs. According to interviews, the biggest challenge with working from home is the lack of social interactions, bad ergonomics and distractions. But your working day is flexible. The best thing about working at the office is socializing, better ergonomics and tools. People also seem to appreciate different spaces for working, the open office can be too noisy and distracting for many.

We collected insights from interviews on our virtual Miro board

We did a benchmarking on what has been done already on the same problem. Based on our research and interviews we created our personas:

How might we...?

Based on the data we gathered we came up with how might we question:

How might we make use of the office space in a hybrid model?

With our personas in mind and the challenge goal we have designed a plan for how the future of offices could look like.

The concept

To help our office experience come together we have come up with a platform that can be used by our commissioner, the office workers and private persons.

With the help of this platform the commissioner can collect all the data that different sensors and tracking systems have gathered and use this information to make their services even more efficient. The office workers can see what spaces are available, book rooms, order services and supplies or contact maintenance. Private persons can see the different spaces available and book themselves a private room for working, a conference room for a party, the sauna or even a table at the restaurant. The platform would be fully customizable for every office building depending on their services and spaces.

With this solution companies get the most use out of the office space. Owners and tenants get more revenue, the commissioner get more demand for their services and the users have a versatile selection of spaces to select from.

Plan of action

Until this point, we have explored the possible features for our solution. We will start with the prototype validation and follow the next three steps: