My role: Leading the service design process by teaching my team members about design thinking from research to prototyping.

BRIEF SUMMARY

Just as I expected, the core pain-points of The Executive Centre’s service stemmed from not seeing their vision through. How can members work smarter if they feel their issues are not being solved and don’t feel appreciated?

Solution One: Track the Change.

Description: reassuring members their concerns are being taken care of through request tracking in The Executive Centre’s app.

Concept: The Executive Centre logo appears and the homepage opens with local information and meeting times and meeting room bookings. Member presses “request”, a list of processing and past requests appear, the member clicks “more details,” and tracking of the requests appears with steps to completion.

Benefits.

• Members know what to expect

• Organized

• Builds trust

• Transparent

Solution Two: Listening Lunch.

Description: a monthly opportunity for members to speak up about frustrations and opportunities for their workspace.

Concept: the event appears in the “events” section of the app with an option to RSVP until the day before. The goal is to build trust with members by opening communication with them. In the storyboard above, Matt, our user persona, experiences an issue that causes a pain point and prompts him to consider leaving the space. While our ultimate goal is to be rid of all pain points, the Listening Lunch is a place where those opportunities for improvement can be addressed, heard, and changed beyond the expectations of the member.

Benefits.

• Members are heard

• Opportunity to resolve issues before members decide to leave

• Open communication

THE PROCESS

MARKET RESEARCH

Market research was conducted to get a better idea of the regional statistics, work culture, and demographics. This helped us make a case for our provisional personas. The Executive Centre exists in Australia, Greater China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, UAE, and Vietnam, so we segmented our research into South Asia, East Asia, South East-Asia, UAE, and Australia.

INTERVIEWS

Overview:

I interviewed 2 managers from each international segment who worked for companies that left The Executive Centre. I asked them open-ended questions about their experience with The Executive Centre, both in person and virtually. I also asked them about their new workspace and what drew them to it.

Key findings:

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

A Competitive Analysis was conducted to examine strengths, weaknesses, and strategies when it comes to branding, physical presence, and an online presence. Our greatest strengths were the design of the spaces, upscale clientele, consistent branding, and the community network. Our greatest weaknesses were low employee satisfaction, poor reviews, and inconsistent service.

Empathy Map

We synthesized our research into sticky notes which we organized in a large empathy map. We organized first by feeling, seeing, doing, saying, and hearing. From there, we further synthesized by grouping sticky notes into patterns.

User Persona:

The empathy map had enough patterns to develop user personas, Matt and Trish, who represent two “archetypes” of The Executive Centre client. For the continuation of the project, we referred to our user’s goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations, when designing.

POV Statements and HMW Questions:

Once the research had been synthesized and we had an understanding of our users needs and goals, we needed to continue to define the design challenge. We created a set of POV statements based on the needs and insights. From there, we created How Might We questions that would help us brainstorm how to solve the design challenge.

Brainstorming session:

To loosen up and start thinking out of the box we made some bubble maps and generated wild ideas using keywords.

I posted our How Might We questions on the wall and we conducted 2-minute brainstorming sessions for each one. We came up with as many solutions as possible on sticky notes.

Design:

Our research led us to come up with multiple solutions to improve The Executive Centre’s experience for clients and decrease the number of members who choose a competitor’s serviced workspace. Two of the suggestions we presented to stakeholders were Track the Change and Listening Lunch.

Based on our solutions we came up with storyboards and low-fidelity prototypes to present to stakeholders. You may see examples at the beginning of this presentation!

After-Action Review.

• The best part of this project is that I was able to step into this “expert” position in this organization that I really respected that has its foot in many different countries. I also felt proud of myself for pushing back against executives and really help this organization from client loss and save them money and time.

• I was expecting to find one or two pain-points in the service to improve. I was not expecting to find deep organizational places for improvement and such simple service design pain-points.

• What I learned is I enjoy interviewing dissatisfied users and want to have a larger pool to speak with in the future and ethnography is meaningful to me and incredibly important when making business decisions. I also enjoy stepping up to the plate, teaching others, and working with diverse teams.

There’s much more to it! To speak with me about this experience and my process please email hannahpatience@gmail.com.