cove Mobile App Design
Updating an existing mobile app
Personal Role: Project Management, UX Research, Wireframes, UI Development, Design Assets
Introduction
The Cove Mobile App is for members of Cove - a co-working company based out of Washington DC. It is essential to the member experience, providing access to the space (QR Code at front desk), room reservations, communicating with cove staff, and other social features.
Project Scope: 2 Phases
Phase I: The original app was designed in 2015-2016, but by 2018 had shown significant gaps in user experience and had long completion times for key tasks. Our first goal was to understand and fix these issues quickly.
Phase II: After the above updates are complete, we wanted to take a deep dive into redesigning and updating features on the mobile app that more closely align with our user’s goals.
What I Inherited
A visually passable app, but was getting negative user feedback on UX for 2 key tasks. The first phase of the project was understanding and fixing these key issues to cut down on customer support needs and improve member experience as quickly as possible. Once we felt that this was achieved, we would delve into a full redesign of the entire app, complete with user research and UI Development. A snapshot of some of the major problems and solution are below:
Understanding the Complaints: Running Timed Tests
To better understand where the frustrations were happening, I borrowed 4 phones in total to run some tests. Two nearly new phones: a new Samsung Galaxy and an iPhone X. Plus two older phones: a 3 year old iPhone SE, and 4 year old iPhone 6. I then grabbed a timer and went through the motions for completing the top two tasks that were experiencing issues: Scanning In and Unlocking a Door. The results were a relatively wide range of times, with the older phones experiencing much longer load times than the new phones. The 52 seconds the iPhone 6 gave to unlock a door was far too long, however we felt even the 20 seconds the new phones were clocking was unacceptable. The diagram below shows where the time was clocked on each step.
Design Goal: Improving Completion Times
The top 2 tasks for the app both have issues of load times and UX flow, which we knew through consistent feedback from our help-desk and ticket items.
1. Scanning in, which 100% of cove members need to do, currently takes between 20-35 seconds; far too long to be standing in front of a welcome host waiting for the app to load.
2. Unlocking a Door, which around 62% of our members will need to do if they stay after 6pm, also takes anywhere between 20-52 Seconds. This time needs to be reduced —people are stuck outside in the cold waiting for their app to load.
A few questions I considered:
Can we reduce the amount of clicks and screens to achieve these tasks?
What information should be showed during these tasks?
How can we ensure maximum clarity and simplicity?
By reducing clicks and designing smarter ways to store sensitive data, we came up with a solution that increases speed from 20 seconds to 7 seconds.
After design exercises and evaluating all necessary functions, it became clear that time and ease of use could be improved if the initial screen was the “Scan” tab, as that’s the 1st action that every member takes when they enter a space. For the “Unlock a Door” function, by adding a back-end strategy to have planned number changes in advance, we can easily store the door codes in the app’s cache, eliminating the need to “Request a code” that was in the legacy app.
User Research: Feature and Design Development
After shipping the above update out to members, we transitioned the focus to develop other features, update the visuals, and better understand what our users want. We sent a poll to around 100 members, asking what features they would find useful or which they have no use for. Here were the results:
Survey Learnings and Comments:
The surveys were useful in helping us to prioritize the top tasks and reprioritize features that, while nice to have, a limited number of users were excited about. For example, there was a surprising amount of enthusiasm for obtaining a general sense of people’s names and occupations of those around them and to move from stranger to acquaintance. However, there was a more limited level of interest in actually networking in a more formal way. The chat feature, for example, was very unpopular when asked about chatting with other members, with people worrying about spam messages or other unsolicited tones. The “Chat with Host” feature, on the other hand, was extremely popular, with reports of wanting to report minor issues without having to leave their desk or call a number. We took these results, averaged them out in terms of popularity, and re-thought the UX of the mobile app.
Example Analysis Document: Home Screen
