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Helping Designers Do What They Love
A small team at WeWork led the discovery, design and development of a zero-to-one application called Furnish that decreased the time it took for interior designers to spec out a project by 50 percent.
The Situation
The investors wanted Adam Neumann to be “crazier” but what we knew was the way the interior design teams worked couldn’t get any crazier.
The tools interior designers were using at WeWork were crippling, making it difficult for them to meet their deadlines. Spreadsheets were the main tool for project management, supply chain logistics and finding available furniture from warehouses.
These systems were breaking as WeWork grew. So, our team led the discovery, design and development of a zero-to-one application called Furnish.
Design Challenge
We are going to support the creative process of interior designers, enabling them to craft inspiring spaces that enhance WeWork clients' productivity.
Understanding the Problem
Broken is a subjective term. We needed to fully understand and quantify what broken meant.
- What dependencies existed across disciplines? How did people work together?
- What were the mental models of interior designers & how did this drive decision making?
- When did the current service design break and where in the process?
- What tools were currently being used and what were the opportunities and challenges these tools created?
We started this work with a design sprint to unpack and validate user needs, business needs and technology capacities.
During the design sprint, I led the team using various research methods to unpack and validate user needs, business needs and technology capacities.
We spent the first two days of our design sprint interviewing stakeholders, subject matter experts and interior designers. We asked interior designers to draw their current process, including the deliverables at each step, the tools they used and the people involved.
What We Learned
Interior designers are motivated by the unstructured, autonomous nature of WeWork.
“I have a lot of autonomy [at WeWork]. At another firm, I would probably be a junior designer, but here I’m calling the shots for a 3,000-desk building,” One person said.
Sam echoed this saying you “don’t have to be old to be given responsibility.” You can test designs over and over again whereas the usual turnaround is three years in other design companies.
For Michele, she loves “the fact that you are really open to looking at things and discovering things in new ways.”
This is why they chose WeWork.
Even though the unstructured nature of WeWork motivates interior designers, they also need some parameters. They need to know where they are going and what resources they can use to get there.
Tracking in a spreadsheet was not working.
Define
There are two main friction points:
- There isn’t a real-time source of truth people can use;
- The tools do not bring to life a starting point for designers that guides them through what they need to achieve and creates the foundation for decision making.
Problem Statement
We are going to create a service that captures and learns from the decisions our designers make about our spaces, then surface that information in a meaningful way through recommendations that create an outline, a starting point, making the mundane everyday decisions invisible.
Opportunity areas for the business: \
- Significantly decrease time spent on respecs;
- Create predictive models for inventory restock;
- Enhance time spent on impactful member experiences.
User Goals
- Do what I love.
- Transfer raw space into a harmonious experience.
- Experiment and learn as much as I can.
User Needs
- Clear structure for roles and responsibilities that is fair and enables accountability.
- Transparency into entire process even when not directly accountable.
- A schedule that tells her where she is headed and what milestones she needs to hit along the way.
- Ability to be creative and make autonomous decisions.
Key Moments
- Users get item recommendations based on her preferences, region and the space type she's designing.
- Users see clear, reasonably sized images of approved items in stock.
- Users can opt to see more photos of the item, including photos of different finishes, colors, and an image of the item in an existing WeWork space.
- Users see the total cost of an item, including hidden costs like expedited shipping and she is alerted when over budget.
- Users are notified when selections are in stock but currently used in another spec.
- Users get confirmation their items are reserved and trust they will arrive before opening day.
- Users receive a master item list with item statuses that is easily shared with the team.
- Users can see when an item is at risk of not arriving on time and take appropriate actions.
Ideate
I led the team through several crazy 8’s sessions to sketch 100’s of ideas to deliver on the defined key moments.
Afterwards, we narrowed our ideas with blind zen voting then put the remaining ideas on a feasibility and desirability matrix to drive us towards the right experiments to sketch out further.
Provocations were used to do early concept validation with users.
We used card sorting to identify what information was most important to interior designers.
Design
We used best practices throughout the product development process, testing the information architecture of the site through card sorting and tree testing.
As single wireframes become full flows, we tested for usability and validated our understanding of the interior designer workflow was supported by Furnish.
Results
Introducing Furnish
Furnish is an internal Amazon of sorts, capturing and learning from the daily decisions the global design team makes about WeWork spaces. This knowledge base could be used to automate most product & space placement decisions for designers and possibly even automate end-to-end WeWork space design.
Furnish not only made the design process quicker, it gave designers more time to focus on strategic space "moments" that made the WeWork brand shine.
Furnish made designers more confident their design would come to life as planned. Most importantly though, this product was critical to the future of WeWork. The old process would not allow WeWork to grow at the speed Masa termed “crazy.”
Furnish decreased the amount of time it took interior designers to spec out an interior design project by more than 50 percent, making Masa’s WeWork one step closer to reality.
Reflection
The Team
Genevieve Greenwald Product Designer
Laura Cochran, UX Researcher
Sam Carmichael, UX Lead
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More than 15 Years of Experience
Over my 15+ year career I've worn many hats. The case studies in my portfolio thread the needle across my experience as a research and design practitioner and people leader.