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Commercial Real Estate / Enterprise Applications / UX Research & Design
Tackling Hybrid Disengagement by Offering Real-Time Workplace Insights and Recommendations
Project Brief
Duration: Sep 2023 - Jan 2024
Client
One of the world’s largest Commercial Real Estate (CRE) developers with over 3,000 developments and nearly $100 billion in assets under management
Challenge
Reframe the landlord relationship for hybrid companies, where traditional office spaces are underused and employers lack insight into how their spaces support employee engagement
End Deliverable
A data-driven workplace experience platform that provides hybrid companies with real-time insights and improvements that elevate employee experience and boost engagement.
Team
1 Venture Executive
1 Product Lead
1 UX Design Lead
1 UX Researcher
1 UX Designer
My Role: UX Designer
RESPONSIBILITIES
Conduct exploratory customer research to assess product desirability
Design and test concepts to evaluate value propositions with stakeholders
Design and test landing pages
Design a high-fidelity prototype to be used as MVP
CONTRIBUTIONS
TOOLS
Customer Research
Concept Design
User Testing
Product Design
Figma
Miro
Qualtrics
Airtable
INTRO
Hybrid Headaches & Empty Spaces
In January 2023, I joined a new venture team tasked with helping one of the world’s top 10 real estate developers adapt to the hybrid work era.
As flexible work emptied offices and shortened lease terms, the client faced a critical challenge: remain a passive space provider, or evolve.
Our goal was to create a platform that would redefine their role from a landlord into a strategic partner for hybrid companies, boosting employee engagement by providing real-time insights and actionable improvements to their employee experience
DISCOVERY RESEARCH
Learning What Workplace Leaders Really Needed
Fostering a sense of community amongst hybrid employees
Creating spaces dedicated to unique employee needs (fitness, dining, etc)
Use behavioral and space data to inform workplace strategy
Provide insights to measure and improve employee well-being
Our project began with exploratory domain research on hybrid working models, learning what the pains were and what existing solutions lacked. We hypothesized that our solution would need to address 4 key themes:
I created 20 concepts based on these insights and tested them over 2 rounds of 1:1 interviews with Workplace Leaders.
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Workplace Leaders were VPs and Senior management-level executives who oversaw employee engagement efforts at their company. They were our primary stakeholder that we targeted, as they are key decision-makers in the process of buying and adopting employee experience solutions.
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This project was focused solely on creating value for hybrid companies still in need of workspaces for employees. Remote working models were excluded for this reason.
CONCEPT TESTING
Examples of concept cards tested
Early Concepts Fell Flat—How We Regrouped
Initially, Workplace Leaders didn’t elicit high desirability for our ideas— they saw value in our concepts but expressed hesitancy to adopt them.
But why? Partnering with the UX Design Lead, I developed a new testing approach to better understand Workplace Leaders’ unmet needs. We created a customization exercise, allowing Workplace Leaders to rank areas they most needed support.
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We set up a test using Miro. Workplace Leaders were presented with a list of options and asked to identify areas where they most desired support, followed by a discussion unpacking their choice.
The new testing approach— a customization exercise
The result of this study gave us two critically important insights:
Employee needs are constantly changing, making it difficult for Workplace Leaders to understand and adapt to the changing needs of their workforce
Workplace Leaders struggle with developing and acting on insights quickly due to scattered employee data and the time it takes to analyze it
This highlighted the buying motivation of our stakeholder— the need for a tool that could access data-backed trends that lead to actionable insights quickly
Gathering disparate employee data is difficult and time-consuming.
Experience Leads lack tools to analyze and extract insights from the data.
Acting on employee insights requires too much time, resources and coordination, leaving many initiatives incomplete.
Workplace Leader journey map
MORE CONCEPT TESTING
What Employees Needed
We now knew we had to create a vehicle that would engage employees and also collect accurate data, but to do that, we needed to know what Hybrid Employees really needed.
We conducted 1:1 interviews with Hybrid Employees to learn what they struggled with most in a hybrid environment. I then created concepts that could use spaces to address the most prevalent themes.
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We classified the Hybrid Employee as the average employee who comes into the office at least two days per week. We also targeted companies with hybrid, knowledge-focused workforces with headcounts of at least 1500.
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Based on our interviews, the struggles Hybrid Employees faced fell into 3 key pillars:
Performance & Growth— they wanted ways to develop meaningful professional connections and be highly productive in their role
Agency— they desired the agency to work how, when, and where it best suits their personal and professional lives
Purpose— they needed to feel like they belonged at their company and could make genuine human connections with their colleagues
Key Themes and Concept Testing Results
We gained useful qualitative feedback on employee preferences over 15 concept tests, but we also wanted a larger sample size to show significant quantitative differences between them. The UX Design Lead and I conducted two separate large-scale surveys, and the results allowed us to further narrow our offerings.
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Survey 1 - 275 Responses
The first survey was used to validate our concepts with a larger sample size. I compiled this data to help us narrow our potential employee offerings to those focused on wellness, connections, convenience, and spaces.Survey 2 - 300 Responses
The second survey was used to get more clarity on which specific perks and benefits needed to be included in an MVP. I analyzed the 300 responses which gave us insight into how employees prioritized certain features over others.
PROTOTYPE DESIGN
Prototypes that Proved Value
I designed two tailored prototypes: one for Workplace Leaders and one for Employees. Each highlighted the favored concepts from our research.
The landing page shown to Workplace Leaders confirmed that real-time data and continual learning were a key motivator for adoption.
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The landing page shown to Hybrid Employees validated that they were excited and willing to engage with our offerings.
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The four concepts highlighted in our Hybrid Employee landing page
END DELIVERABLE
Landing page testing validated our direction and gave us the confidence to move forward with our MVP: a platform that brings real-time workplace insights and improvements to elevate employee experience for hybrid companies, repositioning our client as an active partner in workplace enhancement.
Partnering with the Product Lead, I designed a comprehensive dashboard that showcased the user flow and capabilities of our solution.
The MVP
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Our solution brought real-time employee data in and around the office available within one dashboard. It provided expert and AI driven improvement recommendations, implemented by the employer and our client. Through our client’s resources, it offered spaces, amenities and services in Workplace Leaders’ buildings and within the 15 minute radius that support their hybrid workforce.
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Dashboard Pages
The Outcome
The MVP we delivered secured funding and is now a core component of the client’s strategy to support their tenants with hybrid workforces. It is currently undergoing in-market testing under CEO oversight, marking our venture as a shift from an idea to a business-critical product.
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