LAUFT

MOBILE APP

CASE STUDY

Lauft

For people and organizations with the freedom to work remotely, Lauft is a network of flexible workspaces designed to empower you to do your best work in the most convenient, consistent and professional way possible.

THE GOAL

A complete redesign of the old Lauft mobile app. It needed to improve basic features, reflect changes the company has made and leave room for future additions. The project involved working with the CEO and developers from concept to creation to deliver a new and improved lauft experience with the added difficulty of working entirely remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first course of action involved familiarizing myself with the Lauft brand. What it is, what it aspires to be, what needs improvement and what needs a complete overhaul. Part of finding a solution to these problems involved a competitive analysis of other loosely related brands to examine how they handle similar aspects. Below are some notes summarising the tones other brands have to see where they are positioned, learn about what they do well and maybe not as well.

Lyft
Friendly, fun, Authentic, expressive, Personable and approachable ride-sharing app that you call when you’re out with friends. More colourful and visual than Uber

Uber
Serious, Professional, bold, corporate, cold, to the point service that you call for a job interview.

Duolingo
approachable, educational, fun, light, supportive, colourful

Airbnb
forward thinking, inclusive, thoughtful, open

Old Lauft App
lacks brand voice, unclear, cold, professional but appears to be unfinished. Tone comes off as a lesser Uber. Needs additional features

New App Tone Goals
Professional but not dull
Clear but not boring
Supportive but not obtrusive
Confident/Strong but reserved
Dynamic and useful
Innovation backed by thought
Smart for your benefit

Lauft is a very unique company. It doesn't have any true competition. This made it somewhat difficult to base design flows on other apps and keep a standardized flow that would be instantly familiar to users. What Lauft offers is a selection of rentable workspaces for any amount of time. Users can rent a desk for themself or rent a large boardroom for group meetings. In a similar way that Uber or Lyft allow you to book rides to wherever you need, Lauft lets you book desks or rooms that allow you to effectively work remotely. More research included looking into how Uber's booking flow works, how apps like Starbucks and Tim Hortons manage their wallet system and various reward plans to encourage customer loyalty.

RESEARCH

Before designs could be started, the basic flow of the app needed to be laid out. Much discussion with the CEO was required here to understand what about the odd app needed to be kept, what needed to be changed and what needed to be brand new. Below are screenshots of different paths of the app. Some of the paths here were changed quite a bit and other aspects were push to later phases. This part of the process was key in estimating deadlines and figuring out the order of importance of features.

Tap the images for details.

SITE MAPS

Low Fi Screens

Below are a handful of low-fi screens. These designs were based on wireframes and helped define the look and feel of the app. Some aspects stuck around in the final product but much of these screens helped steer us in a better direction and realize the main user booking journey needed to be altered.

Tap the images for details

Almost every part of the app went through varying degrees of testing. The biggest example of this was deciding how the user would book a space and a time. If there are no spots available at the selected time how would that be communicated? How would a solution present itself? This was partially overlooked in the original sitemaps and forced us to rethink the main flow.

Originally the screen on the left was separate from the booking type screen. Picking a time with no available spots would force the user to take a step backward. To avoid this, we merged the booking type and booking time screens together so they could work in tandem. Selecting a time would then bring to focus available bookings. Unavailable bookings remain greyed out.

Making this clear to users and ensuring the next steps to take were obvious ones was equally important. Small design aspects like using filled dark square icons instead of blue outlined icons helped users understand that they were not clickable buttons like the time selectors were. Testing small things like this helped reinforce the design and in some ways dictate how to treat other screens in the app.