Re-imagine visitors' experience in workspace
Overview
This project was a 6-month long internship as an Experience Designer at ThoughtWorks India. I as an experience designer was part of GlobalWorkspaces team and was responsible to re-imagine the visitor's office experience for all the ThoughtWorks offices across the Globe.
Timeline: 6 Months
Project type: Graduation project
Tool: User Research, Service Maps, Personas, Ideation, Co-creation, Storyboarding, Paper Prototyping, Hi-Fi Mockups
My Role: Experience Designer
The Team: It was a six-member cross-functional team which consisted of a project manager, a business analyst, an experience designer, two developers and a domain specialist for the initial six months duration of the project.
Objective
Make every ThoughtWorker's and ThoughtWorks visitors’ journey coherent and productive.
Focusing Question
What makes a great ThoughtWorks visitors’ experience?
Who are we designing for?
Visiting Employees
An Employee or contractor who has an OKTA account.
Is traveling to another company office, could be any company office around the
world.
Other Roles who are part of the Visiting Experience
Host and/or Local Employees who are
part of the visiting experience
Building security/reception
External Visitors
VIPs, Clients
Candidates for interviews
Vendors
Family or friends
Meeting attendees
Contractors
Event attendees
Delivery people
Initial Asumptions
Everything is based on paper logbook at the front desk.
Access systems, used around the world by ThoughtWorks are different, region by region (and even office by office), so visiting employees might face issue while visiting other offices.
There is no standard process of visitors’ entry into the ThoughtWorks offices around the world.
Its difficult for administration to assign a host to an uninvited visitor. And there is lot of waiting involved in the visitors’ journey.
We have security concern (e.g: GDPR) for Facial recognition / Bio-metric access control system, so solution around this is not proactively researched.
Understanding the Journey
We chose open-ended interviews as a research tool to understand visitors' journey as our first step to discover opportunities. The interviews aimed at understanding the journey of a visiting employee and a non - employee.
So, the journey we were focusing on was the journey from the point in time a visitor commutes to the company's office till the time he exits the company's office(the physical space). Also, taking in account the Global priority for the business, the prioritized target group would be candidates.
To define the scope and the major problem statement of the project, we took business priority, company’s yearly objectives and areas of opportunity in consideration.
The Major Problem Statement
How might we give the perception of being an advantaged technology company and also keep optimal human interaction in the whole visitor journey, make it more coherent and productive?
Target User Group
Clients
Candidates(priority)
Company Employees
Event attendees
On the basis of the Scope of our project based on the business priority, the target user group and the targeted visitors’ journey for an employee and a non - employee, we identified the core stakeholders and the extended stakeholders for this project.
The following Ecosystem Map displays the relationship between the target user (candidate), different actors and stakeholders. Also, It displays the priority of actors and stakeholders on the basis of their affect on target user’s experience. It also illustrates the relationship between each stakeholder and each actor.
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Secondary Research
We interviewed lateral hires in the company to walk us through the visitors’ journey in their respective previous company to help us understand other companies' processes and intervention with respect to the visitors’ journey and the user group, we are targeting for this project.
Insights from Competitive Analysis
Augmenting visitor’s experience should be seen as a means of showcasing the company’s potential and capabilities.
Even if we opt for an automated process of registration and access, the intervention should be in a way that the human factor in it, is not reduced and the security is not hampered.
The visitors should not feel too dependent, they should have the freedom to roam and navigate within the space.
In most of the cases, the front desk/ reception/security was informed regarding visitor’s visit to the office.
Visitor identification is something needed for security purposes. (different
color tags for different types of visitors)
There were dedicated attempts / intervention by companies to have a welcoming gesture towards the visitors, to make their experience better(digital boards displaying their name to welcome them). It creates a sense of assurance in the minds of visitors that they are in the right space.
Targeted Research
We did another round of targeted interviews with respect to the scoped-in visitors’ journey to understand every facet of the visitors’ journey. The research tools we opted for were user interviews and Service Map to understand every facet of the visitors’ journey
Service Map
The As-Is service map evolve from an assumption-based service design map into research-based ones with a solid foundation on research data. Initially we made individual service maps for a thought worker and non- thought worker, but later on, it evolved into a single cumulative service map which covers all the aspects of both journeys.
The As-is Service Map showing the Front-stage and Back-stage activities and tochpoints of candidate’s journey
Insights from the As- Is Service Map
Actor relationship and Other Systems
The service blueprint helped us in understanding the relationship of the target user group with other actors involved in the visitors’ journey. Also it helped us in discovering the system touch-points in at every stage of the journey in the company.
The Spectrum
The spectrum describes “what visitors’ experience means for a visitor”. The least expectation for a visitor is that every touch-point they are interacting with is usable /functional and this expectation from the visitors’ experience evolves to be more aesthetically pleasing and technologically-wow. Hence, different type of visitor have different expectations form the visitors’ experience.
Role - Based Personas
The personas were created based on the user interviews and research(secondary research, service map and physical journey), we had till then in the process.
The personas we developed had a role-based perspective as different roles in the company played an important part in decision-making while ideating solutions. The business priorities for these roles also play an important part
in informing the ideation.
Opportunity Mapping
We mapped the common pain points for visitor types separately and the pain-points particularly to a visitor type separately. We also mapped the pain-points of the backstage actors. after mapping the pain points, we came up with twenty-three problem statements.
The reason for mapping the pain-point/problem statements in such a way because it will give us a clear picture of which problem to target first while prioritizing.
The Problem Statements
INVITATION + NAVIGATE TO OFFICE:
1. How might we get a Visitor(e.g: candidate/
client/emplyee) aware of what he should know and carry before the visit?
2. How might we know more about visitor’s expectations and literally move closer to them?
3. How might we help visitors to navigate to our office in a relaxed and happier way?
4. How might we provide information(culture / plug-points / climate) to a client/employee regarding the place, the client/ employee is visiting?
OFFICE RECEPTION:
5. How might we provide a welcoming experience to the visitors, when there is a receptionist at the company office?
6. How might we provide a welcoming experience to the visitors, when there is a receptionist or no receptionist at the company office?
7. How might we provide the visitor with a better registration process experience?
8. How might we speed up the process of providing a host to a visitor?
9. How might we fasten the process of registration for visitors during the time of the event as they have to queue up while registering?
ACCESS CONTROL:
10. How might we authenticate the process of visitor access and still keep it less troublesome for the visitors?
11. How might we standardize the process of visitor registration and access in all the regions?
ACTIVITIES IN OFFICE:
12. How might we make the waiting activity/process, less tiresome or more pleasant in between interviews/activities?
13. How might reduce the waiting period for visitors in between interviews and activities?
14. How might we make the navigation in office be more comfortable for our visitors?
15. How might we make the visitors recognizable when they’re participating
in activities in office?
16. How might we make visitors and employees get to know the details of the
activities happening in our offices?
17. How might we help visitors’ connect to Wi-fi seamlessly as soon as they enter the company premise?
18. How might we deal with emergencies/
extreme cases happening during the office activities? Ex: the emergencies origin from buildings’ events, visitors’ changing plans, problems of the facility and so on.
19. How might we provide a dedicated place for visitors when waiting for the host, so they are not thrown out from meeting rooms from time to time?
Problem Prioritisation
We prioritized the problem statements based on the value - frequency matrix with the support from the stakeholder governance body.
The objective of prioritizing problem with stakeholders is because they help to align our project with business priority, and communicating the same to the wider operating committee.
Prioritised problem statements
Out of the prioritized problem statements, the team decided to solve for the 'registration process' problem because that problem statement seemed to be looping in other problems in itself and could solve for those also.
To know more, Go through the Design Phase of the Project