Helping WeWork Help Chicago
The Brief
My three person team worked with alongside WeWork’s community managers and members to create an internal platform that connects its for-profit business members with local nonprofits to foster community and maximize members’ time.
Platform
Web
Methods
End User Interviews + Persona Development + Concept Testing + A/B Testing
Team
Interaction Designers
Time Frame
4 weeks
Background
Founded in 2010, WeWork has provided collaborative, co-working office spaces to a variety of businesses—from freelancers and entrepreneurs to large scale corporations. Over the years, WeWork has spent much time and energy to create a global community with its 270 locations in 22 countries.
WeWork’s Chicago—based community managers came to us expressing that it was time to extend the idea of community past the confines of their offices and provide a product that enables people to connect with local nonprofits.
Challenges & Assumptions
Throughout the duration of the project we had the opportunity to work in the same vicinities as other WeWork businesses. While this provided a unique perspective and advantages unlike other projects, my first client project had its we fair share of unexpected challenges.
SCOPE CREEP
The scope of the project was kept fairly broad and with little oversight from the community managers spearheading the project, we were given a lot of freedom to play around with ideas and potential solutions for the volunteer platform. Occasionally my team had the tendency to fall into a scope creep, where we were tempted to solve for issues that members had surrounding the WeWorks community board and app.
TROUBLE RECRUITING USERS
Recruiting users was surprisingly difficult! Although we had an abundance of resources such as a comprehensive directory of WeWork businesses, free room booking credits for incentives, and worked in close proximity, users would rarely give us the time of day! We had to conduct two rounds of user interviews to gather more depth and breadth of user insights.
Research
We used various research methodologies such as domain research, competitive analysis, user interviews, and contextual inquiry with the intent of understanding the market, our users, and ways to improve the current process of connecting WeWork members with nonprofits.
User Interviews
We conducted 7 in-depth interviews with WeWork members and 3 SME interviews—two from WeWork community managers and one from the nonprofit sector. After speaking with users and SMEs we discovered:
Discussing current positives, pain points, and potential opportunities with the team.
We grouped insights from SMEs and users from frustrations with the current work environment to motivations of volunteering.
COMMUNITY IS HARDER TO COME BY
Community is one of WeWork’s biggest value proposition and members want to connect with others for professional and personal development. However, from observations and interviews, members revealed that they weren’t connecting with other members as easily as they assumed. While the physical space and weekly event offerings make an attempt at bringing people together, WeWork’s mobile community platform is inactive and it’s difficult to catch people on the go.
MOTIVATIONS TO VOLUNTEER VARY
We learned that there are various reasons why people would volunteer, including being drawn to a relatable cause, participating when it’s convenient, and providing opportunities for good PR and building team camaraderie. Members who volunteer usually are drawn to causes they have a personal connection with, and many of them want to rally coworkers and friends to get involved. Since members commute and a have personal life, members who volunteer less often or not at all wish to make the best use of their time by volunteering for something they care about, is convenient, or doesn’t require too much commitment.
FRUSTRATED BY THE VOLUNTEER PROCESS
From our interviews, members who don’t volunteer or volunteer seldom mentioned frustrations that touched on many aspects of the volunteering process from research and discovery to post-volunteer. Finding a nonprofit to volunteer or donate to is a daunting process for novice volunteers. While on the flip side, we uncovered that volunteers wished there was more follow-up on the impact of the time or money given to charities for continued sense of satisfaction and trust.
Personas
As stated prior, we had two rounds of user interviews, which led to the creation of 2 different types of users at WeWork.
PRIMARY PERSONA
SECONDARY PERSONA
Key Opportunity
The Problem
After initial desk and user research, we found a common theme between our users. Whether members were dedicated to giving back to specific causes they were passionate about, or were more professionally motivated, all users longed for a greater sense of community that attracted them to WeWork in the first place.
We inevitably determined that the root problem is:
New WeWork members feel disconnected and need a way to easily engage with others through volunteering because they want to foster community so they can facilitate team-building and promote their company.
Design Principles
ME TO WE
Foster community engagement by encouraging people to share their volunteer experiences.
PASSION POINTS
Cater to user’s passions. Keep the information lean and specific to the user and their interests.
WELCOME ABOARD
Get the user quickly acclimated to the platform and to be able to start interacting immediately.
EVERYBODY WINS
Build trust by guiding the user through the experience, from discovery to impact.
Design
After rounds of rapid iteration from concept and usability testing with WeWork members, we collectively landed on the concept and design of DoGood. DoGood is a website that selectively filters and guides users through partnering with the right nonprofit to suit their schedule and interests while connecting them to others with similar passions.
Concept testing an events-focused volunteer platform with WeWork member, Mariano.
Co-testing the usability of the first iteration of the prototype with WeWork member, Marcus.
Our solution offers an effortless and curated signup, a comprehensive checklist before, during, and after the volunteer event, and member and nonprofit profiles. Key screens and flows include:
I was able to contribute to the final design by creating a filtering system thoughtful of members’ interest and event type, developing user and nonprofit profiles, and establishing the information architecture of the site.
Results
Visual Design
After presenting our findings to the stakeholders and designers, our prototype was selected out of 4 other teams to be continued as a project for UI teams to help rebrand and bring our wireframes to life! Here are a couple key screens:
Lessons learned
Mobile isn’t always the best solution. With only prior experience designing in mobile, I initially assumed that users would be more prone to using a volunteer platform via an app. However, after learning that users primarily use the WeWork community board at work on a desktop or laptop we saw it as an obvious and more practical solution to design for web. Listening to the needs of the users was the best way to guarantee a useful product.
How to design with multiple personas. I think personas can be a great tool to utilize when making thoughtful design decisions around a segmented user base. However in this project I learned that in order to avoid making them too broad we needed to consider two types of members we tested with. Doing so helped me prioritize the needs of our primary persona, Courtney, while considering additional needs of our secondary persona, Dan.
Get scrappy sooner. From the start, we had a difficult time recruiting users. After hours of cold calling, sending emails, messaging on the community board, and sending out surveys, the hard work wasn’t paying off. I learned how to utilize the space and participate at events to speak with the members and gain rapport which helped users feel more comfortable returning for concept and usability testing.
Thanks for making it this far!
Feel free to contact me at hello@ashlynndenny.co if you have any thoughts, questions or feedback.