Reservations
platform
Web (Desktop and Mobile)
team
User Researcher Lead, Product Designer, software Engineers, Product Managers, and SME's.
role
Product Design Manager
UX Design • 2020
Overview
Reimagined the employee's experience with reserving workspace, conference center rooms, and parking spaces in offices around the globe.
Problem
Liberty Mutual employees are required to use several applications to reserve a workspace, conference center room, and parking space. All current reservation systems are not available for mobile devices.
Objective
An ideal solution would be a mobile friendly experience that allows our employees to access one single product to make any necessary real estate related reservation. This will save our employees time by reducing the need to search and use several applications to make a reservation.
learning
Building empathy and identifying user pain points
At the start of this project, we lacked any user research to help build empathy, validate assumptions, and ensure we were solving the right problem. I partnered with my User Research lead to conduct research targeting our global employees to establish a baseline for the existing reservation experience and help uncover key insights. We conducted focus groups, surveys, and a usability test of the existing Liberty Mutual Hotelr product.
Our research surfaced that employees were spending a significant amount of time manually reserving a workspace, reserving a parking space, and reserving a conference center space because each product has their own unique URL, user interface, and process. Also, majority of employees were unable to create, modify, and view their seat reservation on their mobile device because they're not enrolled in the Liberty Mutual Bring Your Own Device
The working team prioritized the top use cases, mapped out the user flow for the current state. As we walked through the current state, we pulled in pain points and opportunities are users expressed during our user interviews. Top identified pain points included identifying the appropriate product to create their reservation, tools require using their laptops on VPN, unable to make a single reservation with multiple non-consecutive days, and busy maps.
Our research insights empowered us to make design decisions and prioritize the largest opportunity areas in the digital experience.
User Problem: Multiple Products To Reserve
Employees spend a significant amount of time manually reserving a workspace, reserving a parking space, and reserving a conference center space because each product has their own unique URL, user interface, and process
exploration
Collaborating and exploring design solutions
The next step was brainstorming, ideating, and exploring concepts that would resolve the user's problems.
I proposed a design studio approach to collaborate with our cross-functional partners from Corporate Real Estate, Workplace Management, Product Management, and Engineering. The goal of the design studio was us to co-create solutions and concepts that would solve the identified user pain points with the existing reservation experience.
I proposed a two-day design studio to our stakeholders and leadership team but due to availability and timing we pivoted to a half day design session. I was responsible for creating the agenda, facilitating, and creating a design brief for the design studio.
The HMW we used for our design studio was:
"How might we empower Libety Mutual employees to easily reserve a workspace, parking reservation, conference space on demand?"
We started off by sharing the new vision for the return to office experience and quickly recapped the findings from the research to level set with the group. Afterwards, the working team prioritized the top three personas to map the end-to-end experience. We highlighted the actions from pre-return to office, before arriving to the office, and being in the office.
Then, we moved into mapping out a future state user flow that would mitigate some of the users pain points and proceeded to return to update this map as we identified new features and ideas to try.
Next, the team was given time to individually rapidly idea concepts and features and then we went through a affinity exercise to theme similar ideas. We voted on the top ideas and concepsts we wanted to carry into our sketching phase. Features we wanted to test included: Quick reservations, text reminders, single feedback experience, updated maps for mobile users, and customization features such as favorite groups, preferences, and workspaces.
Armed with our ideas and concepts, we started our next phase by writing down some ideas on paper and followed up with a rapid idea generation exercise known as Crazy 8’s. The team was given about 20 minutes to take their ideas and sketches and convert them into a higher fidelity solution sketch. Each person shared their solution sketch with the entire working team to receive generate additional ideas or enhancements.
materialize
Establishing design language and approach
Before starting to design, we needed to identify our design language, visual identity, and technical constraints. The existing products used a myriad of different styles, components, and did not utilize the Liberty Mutual Enterprise design system. Additionally there were accessibility failures including color contrast and cognitive load.
We deisigned the new Reservation product using the Liberty Mutual Enterprise design system in desktop and mobile versions. The new design meets the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines. Below are the mobile versions of the new design.
The features highlighted below focus on solving for user problems we identified above:
Reservations all-in-one place
The former experience required users to navigate to three separate touch points to reserve a workspace, conference center space, or garage space.
In our new improved experience, the user can reserve all the previously mentioned spaces in one digital experience.
Pick a seat for me
The new 'pick a seat for me' feature allows users to quickly reserve a seat in an office without having to review seating maps. The concept was designed to help save our 'traveling' and 'professional' personas that travel frequently to offices and only need a space for a short duration.
Clean and Simple Maps
Our new maps were completely redesigned to work natively on mobile devices and reduce any distractions from making a seat reservation. The colors were carefully selected to draw a users eyes to available seats while retaining the basic layout for each floor's neighborhood.
Groups and favorites
Users can quickly search or filter to find where their favorite team members are sitting and reserve an available seat next to them. Assign "favorite" team members in the sliding panel to reduce time conducting manual searches or filters to find a person.
Notifications
As a new feature, users will now be able to control their communication preferences and even have notifications go to their personal e-mail or their cell phone.
Reminder Messages
For the first time, our users will be able to make changes to their reservations via text messages. Upcoming reminders will be sent to a users that opt-in to the text message notifications. Users will be able to cancel their reservation by replying back to the notification with the word 'cancel'.
Conducted qualitative and quantitative user testing
The design team facilitated several rounds of user interviews and usability tests to share our initial concepts with Liberty Mutual employees to validate our designs and concepts. We invited our product management, engineering, and business stakeholders to our sessions to help increase speed and the acceptance of our findings. The tests measured desirability, success, satisfaction, and ease of use for critical tasks such as creating a new reservation.
The tests results showed that users responded highly satisfied (4.8 out of 5 rating) with our overall proposed concepts and designs. Nearly all of the participants were able to successfully complete all our top identified tasks in the reimagined Liberty Mutual reserve experience.
Participants are still following existing process flows in the current Liberty Mutual reserve experience but expressed that the new process flows were more desirable. Example: Expected to need to cancel their existing reservation and create a new reservation instead of modifying a single or entire reservation span.
results
Outcomes and lessons learned
After sharing our key insights from the user research with product management, engineering, and business stakeholders, the approval was granted to move forward with building the product using our designs.
Next steps:
- Create design handoff guides and collaborate with our engineering teams to ensure the product is built as designed.
- Run unmoderated usability testing with a heavier focus on our global employees, synthesize key insights, and iterate designs.
- Run discovery and exploratory research efforts for the Liberty Mutual Reserve administrator experience and identify top concerns, pain points, and opportunities.
Lessons learned:
- Include our partners and stakeholders in any research efforts lead because it leads to higher acceptance rates of research key insights.
- Increase transparency by allowing all our stakeholders onto our virtual note taking and synthesis white boards.
- Increase collaboration by sharing links to prototypes that visually demonstrate our ideas and concepts early and frequently with our developers and product owners.
