P01

WeWork Together

Create networking opportunities at WeWork spaces effortlessly.

My Contribution

UX Research, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping

Tools

Figma, Adobe After Effects,
Adobe Premier

Project Length

5 week academic project,
Spring 2022

Team 

Kitty Cheung, Jarrod Pan,
Christian Lim, Emma Wu

Overview

In this 5-week senior experience design project, we were tasked with framing a design problem and delivering an experience design solution. After in-depth research, prototyping, and a design sprint, the final solution came together as a mobile application for WeWork members to discover others and expand their professional network.

About WeWork

WeWork is a provider of flexible shared workspaces from communal desks to offices. With over 700 worldwide locations including physical and virtual shared spaces, subscribed members of WeWork will find no shortage of unique office environments desirable for both freelancers to Fortune 500s.  

Part 1

Investigation and Insight

"Co-working spaces are shared office environments for independent professionals. Such spaces have been increasing rapidly throughout the world, and provide, in addition to basic business infrastructure, the opportunity for social interaction."

From a research journal article by Swapna H. R.

When it comes to finding the right place for productivity, WeWork excels at giving its members a suitable place to complete their goals. However, after investigating numerous weblogs, academic journal articles, and online discussion boards, we found networking was a major contributor to people paying to work in a communal space. 

“Well actually, it's not all about productivity while at WeWork, because I can do that at home just fine. It was more of being able to get human interaction and being in a space where other motivated people are working on their own craft. ”

From an interview with a WeWork member

As none of our team members had been to WeWork prior, our team conducted interviews with 5 WeWork members to ensure that our external research matched the reality of how WeWork members interact within the workspace. The consensus was that the engagement between other members was limited due to members being hard at work or reluctant to risk disrupting another member's workflow. Despite this, all 5 of our interviewed WeWork members agreed that they were happy to network with other members.

Framing the Problem

Returning to WeWork’s values of promoting collaboration, our team saw a missed opportunity in the fact that many WeWork members wanted to engage and connect with other members but had difficulty doing so. By leveraging WeWork’s communal workspaces with the existing WeWork application, we could kickstart the networking process for people to build meaningful professional connections.

Part 2

Our App WeWork Together

WeWork Together is an addition to the WeWork mobile app that opens new opportunities for users to build meaningful connections and expand their professional network. By leveraging WeWork’s communal workspaces, users can kickstart the networking process and collaborate with like-minded individuals through coworking areas and community events.

 WeWork Together use case demo

Expand your network

WeWork Together's landing page displays a live total of the members present at the selected WeWork location. The most popular sectors are displayed proportionally with each being assigned a coloured bubble. This allows WeWork users to easily distinguish the members of different sectors for easy viewing. Within each category, users can find more details about each member of the community. Not looking to chat? Every member of WeWork may change their discoverability setting from online or offline with the toggle.

Discover people in your industry.

Keep in touch with the community with events

Currently, events hosted by WeWork are only available through their online web browser, to streamline this, WeWork Together brings events to the WeWork app, allowing members to explore events all in one place. All the details of the event are easily viewable, including the work sector breakdown of attendees.

Browse events for all WeWork locations in the area.

Not enough time to chat during the event?

Attendees of the event can revisit the guest list and send requests to other members they have an interest in connecting with. All prior attended events are accessible in the Past Events tab.

Rediscover prior WeWork event attendees and connect.

Expanding connections to the real-world

The objective of WeWork together was to kickstart the networking process for real-world connections, not to be the next social media chat app for professionals. Thus, the profile features and chatting options are limited to communicating the important details and confirming meeting details of time and place. Within the connections tab, users can quickly access their upcoming, pending, and general connections while also accepting or removing any new requests.

Keep track of your connections.

Schedule meetups within WeWork spaces

Scheduling a meeting with WeWork through the app is seamless, the location, time, and duration are conveniently paired with numerous coworking spaces to get the conversation started. Upon user testing, requesting connections first and chatting afterward encouraged members to meet up and conversate, avoiding back-and-forth messaging chats.

Schedule a meetup through the WeWork app.

Part of the content strategy of WeWork Together was to promote face-to-face engagements with WeWork members by keeping chats to a minimum. While reluctant, our team felt that the positive and negative consequences of not including a chat interface would prove to be a frustrating obstacle to the user's overall experience. The functional chat interface allows members to communicate quickly about exact meetup details.

 An efficient chat to make meetups easy.