Payroom Web App

Product Researcher

UX Designer

Product Designer

Type

PWA in production

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Timeline

Team

Me as product designer, Tech lead, Full-stack engineer, QA

Tools

Figma, FigJam, Notion, Adobe

My role

UX/UI, style guide, UX research, User Interviews, Observing users, Analyzing and Synthesizing Data, Mindmap, Prototyping

Context

Payroom is a booking platform connected to smart locks, for short-term and hourly rent for SMBs, coworkings, offices.

Key differentiators

Payment integration+smart locks simplify user path and decrease operational time for landlords or owners to manage properties

Design research

Problem

As the request for Payroom born out of business needs, we came up with simple workflow that could cover critical user tasks for Version 1.

The problem I was focusing as Designer - is that we had MVP with rough UI, so I needed to recollect all the Design in Figma, find challenging moments, and then make Redesign with new style guidelines and updated Roadmap.

Research

As we already had business that intended to use Payroom for its purpose, we had the opportunity to talk to End users and Business as well about how we can make MVP and than redefine the version of the MVP to next critical roadmap iterations.

At the very beginning, we defined with business owners critical functionality for the app

Interviews

We decided to conduct interviews to gather qualitative data. We worked on competitive, comparative research, and on discussion guides. We already knew that the focus of this stage was to cover main customer journey steps through the booking process.

Goals:

To confirm focus on our main audience - psychotherapists and coaches

How people see

Assumptions

Psychologists seek a constant place for rent.

Psychologists look mostly for places close to the metro area, center of the city.

Psychologists would be open to trying to automise their way of booking spaces.

They still will need additional comfort communication channels.

We conducted 7 interviews with psychologists.

Key trends based in Affinity Themes

People lifestyle

Have individual practice, looking for free spaces to work, value clear communication and tools that shortened the time for booking

Flexible schedule

They are looking for more flexible options to book hourly rent as they have major part of their clients who work online.

Understanding of their clients load

Some specialists know they need fixed number of hours for work during week.

Also, specialists who just starting their journey (1-2 years of experience) still looking for ideal capacity of rent hours and work online.

Automation

Psychotherapists are more open to have automised way of getting into space (smart lock i.e)

They prefer to know what schedule is open for booking without checking in through communication.

Define

Our Persona - Clair

"I want to be flexible with my schedule and book hours week by week"

Age

30-50 years

Job

Specialist who need to work within physical space (psychologists, coach, massage therapist)

Location

Big city

Family

Single or have a partner

Who is Clair

Clair works as psychoanalysis therapist for more than 5 years. Sometimes it could be long hours. Clair prefer and insist with their clients to work in a physical space as the process of therapy would work better for them.

Clair tends to build sustainable schedule for a few days per week for working in rental space and other days could be worked from home as she has online sessions. She is concerned with food waste problem, also she wants to teach her kids live more sustainable life.

Goals

To build comfortable schedule with clients;

To have control over renting space for hours she needs to book;

To have quick access to open hours and her schedule within the space.

Frustration and pain points

Sometimes clients don't respond in time and place is already booked.

Got frustrated when can't see open schedule for booking in a place that I want to rent for my practice.

Feel overwhelmed when need to handle in memory spaces that I booked, code doors and other details.

Problem statement

Clair is frustrated with booking process of short term spaces as her clients sometimes change decisions.She is also a bit disappointed when she doesn't see open schedule for hourly work in the spaces.

How might we

How might we help Clair to plan her working schedule in her favourite spaces so she could be flexible with her decisions?

Concept

As we already had MVP version 1, we tried to align our Persona, Key findings and Tech roadmap into priorities for design concept.

Prioritised flow

This is still our main focus as User should book hours seamlessly. It should be quick, without interruptions to other functionality.

Connection to smart lock

This was also our focus from the start as our booking system should be connected to smart locks so User could automatically get the information how to enter the space after booking.

Navigation among booked slots

As for now we are focusing on PWA, it means we won't have for now nav tab as in the mobile app and User should have easy access always get back to My bookings page.

Flexibility with schedule

Users want to be flexible with cancelation and reservation (for 1 hour) features

Task flows

Develop

UX audit framework we used for MVP version 1

Audit of MVP Design

Updated Style guide and Components

High-fidelity updated prototype for end clients

Reflecting on the project outcome

Huge potential

This project has huuge potential to grow into platform for:

1) business who sub-renting their places (beauty, tech coworking, psychotherapy rooms, wellness) and want to easy manage their capacity between different clients

2) nomads, solo-preneurs, specialists freelancers, who need to rent for sort time period or on regular period and also manage their clients+schedule.

Our team believes that right design, tech stack and market positioning could lead Payroom to product market fit.