The Atom is an ultra-luxury co-working space that blends beautiful design with clear form and function. Customers have the ability to hot-desk, the practice of sitting in any available area, or to book dedicated meeting rooms and areas for hours or days at a time.
Launching a co-working startup in the middle of a global pandemic does not, at first, appear to be the most logical course of action. However, every crisis always has hidden opportunities, and we created a completely contactless experience to allow guests to check into The Atom co-working space with just a few taps on their mobile phones.
The initial key challenge was to understand the precise business flow and user journey, and map this to an easy-to-use and intuitive booking flow.
Just like an actual physical space, a digital product also requires a planned architecture to ensure that the people that are going to use the product can easily navigate across the different features and functions.
Generally speaking, the aim is to try and reduce the number of steps and thinking required to complete the most commonly accessed actions.
The above image gives you a bird's eye overview of the various features in the application and how they relate to each other.
For each of the listed features, we then design and reviewed the customer journey to ensure that we captured all the key business steps and requirements, while ensuring a high degree of usability.
As you can see from the above journey, we wanted to create a complete safe and contactless booking experience, ensuring that users can check in completely by themselves without any human interaction required, and the ability to save credit card data for frictionless future bookings.
The key thing with customer journeys is to always think about the customer's end goal in mind, and then understand the process of discovery, education, and actions that lead them to successfully complete this goal.
The Atom already had a distinctive and high-end brand, and we had to design a mobile application to match. We researched the likes of WeWork, AirBnB—as well as luxury hotel group such as Accor—to gain an understanding of best practices and key challenges in booking flows.
We decided upon a photography-heavy design direction, to allow The Atom's interior design to shine through and allow the space to sell itself to the mobile application users.
Designing a high-fidelity prototype is an integral part of the design process for any digital product, because this enables the design team to run usability testing with end users.
Additionally, it also allows our clients to review our work in detail without having to just look at screens on their computers or printed out, they can actually try the product on their mobile phones - as if it was real.
As you can see in the above image, hundreds of links between screens are created, as well as animations to ensure that the prototype feels as life-like as possible.
Feel free to try out the prototype below, and click on the full-screen button to have an immersive experience.
Apart from prototypes, it is also important to have a design system in place, so that future features and modules can follow a consistent design pattern, and the application does not experience a "drift" in the quality and coherence of the design and user experience.
The really useful idea behind having a design system is that it makes the entire application much more flexible with regards to handling design changes. For instance, if the brand is updated and a new typographical style adopted, simply changing the typography in the components will update all the screens and prototypes instantly.
The best results for a digital product come when a great user experience meets a delightful interface, and we believe that this project is a clear showcase of what can be achieved when taking a human-centric design approach, while simultaneously keeping business requirements in mind.
We know that co-working as a concept is here to stay as it offers unrivaled benefits to traditional office space, especially for small and medium-sized business, as well as individuals.
