Saving a co-working space time and money by going through the design sprint process
Background Information:
WeWork is a leader in providing coworking spaces, including physical and virtual shared spaces to startups, freelancers, and a wide variety of organizations. In 2019 as part of their preparation for their upcoming IPO, WeWork was exploring a variety of new monetization paths and they reached out to the team at Toi to help design and build a new service model.
My Role:
Strategist, Designer, Facilitator
I was the design strategist for the project which meant that I needed to lead our research, create our maps and lead workshop sessions. I also needed to take everything uncovered from research and workshop and use that to guide the overall design direction of our prototypes. I also stepped in as a hands on UX designer to help our lead design in creating wireframes and a hi-fi version of the prototype.
Services:
Design Sprint,UX Design, Service Design, Experience Strategy
The mission:
At the time WeWork was having no trouble attracting entrepreneurs, freelancers, and businesses to subscribe to their monthly coworking packages. There was, however, a new customer segment they wanted to attract which was the “one-off” or the single-use on demand user that other co-working spaces were successfully attracting with their on-demand service models. Our challenge was to create a new service model that could work well as its own business while also seamlessly integrating into the larger WeWork system and suite of services as the company didn’t want to create a new service line that would potentially disrupt their primary services.
Impact:
We used our design sprint process to actually invalidate the concept that WeWork wanted to bring to market. The team at WeWork was thankful and grateful for the experience because the process allowed them to test the service model with both external and internal stakeholders before going through a drawn out and expensive design and implementation process. The Sprint stories Publication on Medium shared our story as a case study on how a design sprint can save a company money and time.