WeWork Spacestation - Web Design, UX Research & Team Management
The Team
My Role: Design Lead
Responsibilities:
Improving the functionality and the visual design
UX Research, user and stakeholders Interviews
Communicating and presenting progress with stakeholders and the internal design team
Improving the team’s culture and processes
Mentoring more junior designers
Initiating or taking part in internal initiatives
• 2 PMs
• 2 Product Designers
• 5 Engineers
The story
I joined WeWork in July 2019 through the acquisition of my previous design firm, right at the beginning of the (in)famous fall of the company. I was fortunate to be assigned to the Cosmos team, responsible for Spacestation — an internal tool used by Community Managers for managing bookings and locations, creating and managing events, and overseeing members and memberships. Essentially, it was the beating heart of the company, pumping blood and money into the system.
The opportunity
The opportunity was twofold:
Primarily, working with the Cosmos team to improve the existing tool by refining and adding functionality, and revamping the visual design. This involved conducting research for internally-facing solutions with stakeholders and Community Managers around the world, as well as interviewing members or testing externally-facing ideas and experiments. I also collaborated with other teams, like On Demand and Sales, to help improve their tools.
Additionally, defining and implementing processes that would help my team become more efficient, collaborative, and produce more satisfying output, despite the total chaos unfolding around us. This was one of the most satisying experiences of my career!
Member Profile
Establishing the process
Despite my love for product design and internal tools, the most rewarding aspect of working with the Cosmos team was helping them become the best versions of themselves by introducing a formal feature development process and development lifecycle. To increase buy-in from the team, I involved everyone in creating the documentation and writing definitions for each step. The outcome was truly incredible: when I joined, the team had no process, their meetings were inefficient, and collaboration was lacking; people were stressed out and disconnected. A few months later, it became one of the best teams in the company.
An illustration summarizing the process.
An example of a deliverable.
Booking a room on behalf of the Memeber
Event Calendar
The event calendar was one of the most frequently used parts of the tool by Community Managers. It needed not only a visual update but, as became apparent from multiple interviews, it also needed more features and a better information layout.
Events Calendar and Event Detail Page
Outside of the Cosmos
I was also helping other departments outside of my core responsibilities, such as the Sales team and the On Demand Members team. My task was to improve their tools used for managing pricing and locations. Does anyone else finds designing tables this exciting?!
Internal projects
Those were very challenging times. I “survived” 5 waves of layoffs, luckily with my team almost intact. Employees were demoralized, leadership was unavailable, and work was progressing very slowly. People started quitting to “get ahead of the curve.” My colleagues and I decided to do some fun activities to cheer people up. One of these was setting up a large board at the office entrance where we featured various employees, with details about their hobbies and passions, along with their faces I photoshopped into their favorite music artists.
