Popwork is a start-up company based in Dallas, TX that partners with restaurants and other small businesses to host private pods for working quietly in a crowded place. After my team met with its founder, I led a pro-bono design sprint with two partners to reimagine the app experience.
First, we created user personas and reimagined the product structure from the perspective of those intended users. We dug as deep as the business model itself, trying to figure out what the most stable and longterm path to profitability would be. These decisions ended up influencing the way we thought about the payment portal, web access, as well as the look and feel of the app itself.
We used Miro to track our sprint and used the board to conduct the sprint, identify issues with the existing product, and record references from other apps and interfaces. We built up a profile of the people and contexts that someone would pay to use a pod in a restaurant/coffee shop, how much they would be willing to pay, and used those insights to create some ideas about what the app would be able to do. Based on other reference app interfaces, we created sketches and paper wireframes to envision features and intended functions in the app interface.
We redesigned the original app interface based on our insights from the design sprint and built off the existing interface while working closely to the original brand colors. One of the primary references we mimiced was the app structure for UberEats, which helped us imagine the structural elements for the discovery feature that we wanted to add to the product.
The first sequence that I created was an intro tutorial for first-time users of the app. The existing design simply dropped you into the map experience without much context, which we felt could be easily alleviated with this quick Humaans illustrated tutorial to walk-through the process of using the app and the pods. This was important because most users would likely discover the app by approaching a pod in person, which meant that onboarding would need to happen in that moment itself. We felt it was critical to concisely teach the experience to prevent frustration with the app.
Another major change was based on an insight from imagining the user journey. Originally, the pods appeared on a map based on simply on where pods were located, but we felt it was important in the long term to allow users to discover pods based on the type of business they wanted to visit on a given day. This led to the Discover page (shown below), which I sketched in the wireframe and my partner created the mockup for.
The new design focused on finding pods based on availability, in the Map view, which was a major change, and based on business categories in the Discovery view.
Ultimately, we had a ton of fun redesigning this experience over a couple days and it was technically one of my first forays into the world of product design. We had some discussions about the target audience for the marketing and design, but unfortunately, the founder couldn't find additional funding and so the project ended and we couldn't develop the concept further. Nonetheless, he did hire us to make a few social media ads and gave us a new color scheme that he wanted to take the brand towards, which you can see below.
We were excited about being involved with a start-up, so I co-wrote the copy for these ads and designed the look and feel with suggestions from the founder and my teammates. Even though the project itself remained within purely within Zoom meetings, Miro boards, and XD mockups, the experience really inspired my love for product design and was the first time I felt that entrepreneurial itch that led my learning instincts for years to come. So for setting me off on that journey - thanks Popwork.
