Employee Dashboard
At OfficeSpace Software, I led the design of an all-new employee dashboard, revitalizing the stale and underperforming workplace experience (WEX) aspect of our product, and directly leading to increased feature adoption and new client acquisition. The new experience balances the needs of our globally diverse user base, including those new to our product and those who have used it regularly for years.
The Problem
Employees who logged into OfficeSpace were met with an unintuitive experience and inadequate tools for planning their workday.
In the time since the employee landing page had last been updated—over eight years prior—it had become outdated and unable to adapt to the variety of workflows needed to serve different visitors. And with the trending consolidation of WEX/IWMS tools, our competitors had begun offering more modern, robust solutions. Our metrics showed a dwindling number of new users converting to MAUs, and an uptick in missed sales opportunities that could be tied to this competitive gap.
Starting Small
To ensure we understood the problem, we conducted preliminary research with existing users which revealed that up to 70% of them were actually completely unaware of many key features on the current landing page. More than we realized had not received any training from their company’s implementation team.
Knowing the full redesign was going to be a huge commitment, we decided to de-risk by phasing our releases. We would address the low effort, high impact issues within the existing design first, while laying the groundwork for a more substantial overhaul later.
For that first phase, I made a few small, tactical changes that had a major impact. Adding a live counter to the Who’s In link in the main navigation increased engagement by 41%. Exposing the search bar by default led to a 211% increase in searches. And a new feature that prompted employees to share their booking details with coworkers was used more than 25,000 times in the first three months.
I also designed dual onboarding experiences; one to walk first-time users through the product, and another for existing users so they would not be caught off guard by the change.
Elevating User Voices
Across both phases of this project, we conducted 6 separate research studies, both quantitative and qualitative, with over 300 participants, including existing OfficeSpace users and users who had never seen our product before. We also enrolled key clients in an Early Access Program and collaborated directly with them to ensure there were no adoption barriers going into the general release.
Our research findings informed changes to every iteration of the designs. Encouragingly, they also proved we were on the right track, as the new dashboard outperformed the existing homepage in every experiment, including subjective preference tests and objective usability studies.
A New Concept
For the second phase, it was time to reckon with a fundamental problem with the existing experience – its layout. A floor plan view of the employee’s office took up 90% of the screen, but the majority were not using it to perform key functions that lived elsewhere. Not to mention that most users, in their own words, already knew what their office looked like. It was a waste of prime real estate.
The new design centers around a more user-centric concept: Equip the employee with everything they need to plan their work week. We started by identifying a long list of potential modules that addressed pain points along this journey, then conducted research with both employees and WEX professionals to identify the ones that both groups considered the most high value.
The new card-based layout presents multiple distinct features without feeling too busy or overwhelming. In testing, 87%+ rated this design positively after their initial encounter.
The resulting design is anchored by a multifunction calendar view that surfaces your teammates’ in-office schedules, as well as meetings you might need to attend in person. From this calendar, you can also book a desk in up to 10 fewer clicks. (Yes, 10!)
Additional components include workplace announcements, quick action buttons, and a list of upcoming bookings, all of which help the user make better decisions than they ever could before. Furthermore, the content of the page automatically adapts to users with different seating arrangements and can be customized by their facility admins.
Employees frequently book desks while while commuting to the office, so responsiveness was imperative.
Designing for Scale
Because we were building this from the ground up, it gave me the opportunity to leverage our Mariposa design system. This immediately helped bring our UI more in line with what our users expect and our competitors provide, while building in accessibility standards at the foundation of our front-end framework.
The new design language has set the standard for how the growing OfficeSpace platform will look for years to come.
Outcomes
The employee dashboard was a flagship release, a signal that our product was modernizing and that we were committed to providing a fully integrated solution for facilities teams.
In terms of numbers: We saw an immediate and sustained jump of 14,000 new MAUs following launch, a 5% bump in NPS, and steady adoption of new homepage features with little-to-no falloff. Furthermore, the new employee experience was listed as a critical factor in 10+ high-dollar new logo deals within the first quarter of release, suggesting it helped close a key competitive gap. (Let’s call it “design-influenced ARR.”)
Most importantly to me, our users have provided consistently positive feedback about the update, as well as new insights that we can use to guide even more improvements to their experience.
