A mobile solution to benefit freelancers and remote workers in successfully locating great coffee shops and public spaces to do work from.
Time is money and it holds even more water for people on the hustle. When on the go, freelancers and remote workers generally find it stressful to exhaust time behind finding a good place in the public to work from efficiently.
A community driven platform to foster dependability, enabling faster yet effective information consumption.
Maximum information, minimal interaction, and quicker access to task completion.
Minimize interaction through adaptive information to reduce decision-making time.
A straightforward interface reducing mental exertion and making the user feel at ease.
The Busy Bee
To gather a clearer picture of the envisioned solution and ensure my design ideas match the users' needs, I browsed through various existing apps to discover interactions that could inspire PostUp's experience. My attention gravitated towards four apps - Chipotle, Culture Trip, Kitchen Stories, and DoorDash, due to their focus on task completion through a multitude of routes.
I liked how Chipotle integrates the map in the app, grabbing the user's attention to a bird's eye view of nearby spots while giving the option to search places. This process was incredibly inspiring to me as it aligned with one of my envisioned design solutions. This process would facilitate PostUp's users to reduce the number of interactions by exploring the pin-drops on the map and navigating to the site.
I found Culture Trip and Kitchen Stories to be interesting for their clean yet detailed interaction layouts. Furthermore, they presented ideas for integrating hero content and search box.
Lastly, I liked how minimal yet effective DoorDash is in presenting quick information allowing the user to align interest before clicking on a particular card. DoorDash also inspired me with its filter system.
Once I had all my inspirations narrowed down, I sketched out eight different variations of PostUp’s most critical screen, and soon, it was clear to me which one stuck out the most.
I decided to move forward with the fifth variation of the critical screen as it provided access to a faster task completion process by directly greeting the users with a bird eye view of nearby pin-drops, that users can select from and navigate to.
Once I narrowed down on the critical screen I want to expand on, I wanted to visualize how the users would interact with the interface, what results from their interactions, and what the user would do next.
At this stage, assessing the interface's usability was crucial to evaluate the interface's design and ensure that it is intuitive and easy to use.
For the usability testing sessions, I decided on conducting one round with five users, to validate issues and test solution iterations. All the interviews were conducted in person on my laptop, and each interview lasted about 30 minutes.
A design sprint can get very overwhelming very fast, but once I got the hang of what I was doing, it was, instead, a very efficient process. I understand why people love design sprints and how this can bring value to a product design process.
PostUp’s fundamental vision was to benefit freelancers and remote workers looking for a great coffee shop or any public place to do work from. The goal was to achieve this by bridging the endpoint (getting work done effectively in a public space) with the starting point (looking for a place to do work from) while focusing on simplicity, productivity, efficiency, and trust.
As I was the only person in the design sprint, tasks like sticking to each day’s design sprint responsibilities, deciding which sketch solution to move forward with, and which user-need to tackle first did get challenging. Nevertheless, concluding each day’s tasks made me appreciate the process even more. It started making more and more sense as I came to the end of the project regarding the speed and efficiency of the whole process, and in the scenario where the solution doesn’t work, it was just five days and not a month or more that you exhausted.
If I were to continue on this project, I would love to see if there's a scope for further simplification in the task completion process.
Moving forward, I am planning on integrating this process in some form in my future projects.
