UX Case Study

Fable Hub
An app that talks about the concept of coworking space with child-care and
pet-care facilities.

The problem statement

The rise of technology has led to a surge in the number of freelancers, with self-employed workers increasing from 3.3 million in 2001 to
5.2 million in 2019. However, working from home poses all kinds of distractions. It could be anything from attention seeking dogs to
children, family, personal calls or your chatty neighbours. For freelancers, finding a supportive working environment takes a little bit of
time and research, but the benefits are plenty, which is demonstrated by the rise in co working space memberships at the locations.
Freelancer parents expect a work atmosphere which is a hybrid blend of office work environment and the informality of work from home.
Even after gaining so much popularity for co-workspaces, freelancer parents are unable to fetch a desirable workspace where they can go
about their professional career without compromising parenthood. Our study is an attempt to find what a suitable workspace looks like to a
freelance parent, and how these needs could be translated to an offline platform.

Design Thinking Process

Research Analysis Ideate Design Test

Learning about Sharpen key questions Brain storm & Build representation Test ideas and gain
the user create solution of one or more ideas user feedback

Research

Domain Research

Several market changes have led to new ways of working (Van Meel & Vos, 2001), increasing number of self employed workers (Ketting,
2014; Laterveer, 2011), increasing work flexibility (Gibson & Lizieri, 1999; Laterveer, 2011) and usage of public spaces for the work
(Gibson & Lizieri, 1999; Laterveer, 2011). Multi tenant offices are a result of ‘shifting attitude towards work’ (Sykes, 2014, p.142) that
stimulate networking and collaboration possibilities (Bouncken & Reuschl, 2016). These multi tenant offices are further classified into
several subgroups, namely serviced offices, incubators, regular business centres and co-working spaces.

Studies have focussed on specific subjects of co-working such as knowledge dynamics in coworking spaces (Capdevila 2013; Parrino,
2015), contribution of coworking to the creativity of the city, economic growth and sustaining productivity and innovation (Deijil, 2011;
Moriset, 2013). Coworking spaces are mainly community driven environments where coworkers can improve themselves with the help of
other coworkers (Sykes, 2014). There is a huge community associated with most coworking spaces. The main value of the community is
that it is open and accessible to everyone. This becomes a great platform to share knowledge with coworkers and celebrate each other's
success (Moriset, 2013).

Until now, studies related to coworking spaces are mostly explorative. Researchers have mainly focussed on the users motivation to choose
coworking spaces as their office space. In the study of Deskmag Deskmag (2015), 47% of respondents found rental costs as an important
reason to co work whereas Capdevila (2013) found that location of the space is an important reason for choosing co working spaces. Few
other users noticed that coworking spaces provide them with an inspiring and dynamic atmosphere to work and grow. Rothe, in his study
pointed out that younger workers prefer a workspace that stimulates teamwork and older workers prefer control of indoor climate (Rothe,
et al., 2011). Furthermore, (Remoy and Van Der Voordt (2013)) showed that the sector of organization also influences user preferences, i.e.
creative industry prefer a flexible layout with shared areas, meeting spaces and a representative interior for their organization.

It is true that freelancers thrive in a co-working space, but there are certain gaps to which owners/managers can optimally respond to attract
more tenants in an increasingly competitive growth market. When I started to explore the needs and requirements of a freelancer, I
received new insights into their preferences for co-working space characteristics. There are a large chunk of employees who prefer a break
from their full time engagement and switch to freelancing jobs. The reason why female employees quit from their full time job, include
family issues, health issues, pregnancy related issues or a break after their maternity leave. On the one hand, freelancers know that there is
nothing more real than that to be the owner, director and the financial manager. The flipside of freelancers' lives is that they are most likely
to experience difficulties due to the unstructured nature of their job. In this profile, freelancing mothers are the most affected ones. The
distractions from families and kids may hamper their productivity. Unless these mothers invest quality time on their work, they may lose
out on their career growth or timely payment, which can eventually lead to job dissatisfaction. Therefore, it is essential for her to find a
peaceful work environment and a safe place for kids while she is at work.

Idea Ignition
During our pilot survey session, we studied what major need there is for people needing a shared office. From the compilation done on all
struggle stories of freelancers, we realised that the pain point of a freelancing mother needs to be addressed. This gave me a great
foundation to compose my final survey questions.

As a business initiative, we decided to create an app that finds niche co-working space for parents and pet owners alike so they can go about
their professional career without any interruptions or restrictions.

Though few apps like gofloaters, wsquare.work have pet friendly and women friendly spaces respectively as one of their features, they
aren't categorized or highlighted amicably enough to resolve such unique problems of working parents.
Analysing what has been explored in the area and where is the gap in the market, we knew that our app can contribute better and be well
received among all working parents trying to find a professional work life balance. I had a quick brainstorming with my team members and
had a clear idea on what the name should be. This is a space where people would come to create their own stories of life, follow a dream
career, fulfill their ambition and endorse creativity. So the name - ‘Fable hub’ is a great reflection of “one's fable”, which they are creating
in every step of their lives.

The value proposition

Endorsed by an intuitive and interactive app, one can personalize the workspace environment, based on their preferences and needs
especially when you need to keep in contact with your children or pets. Our desire is to provide amenities which are at par with any other
traditional companies. For a mother, a co working space will provide the same benefit that any other member would get but often with an
added bonus : they get to be close to their kids. For an animal lover, this space makes sure you feel at home and not worry about their
hungry and lonely pets back home.

In short, Fable hub is an app that provides inclusive, accepting, relaxing and inspiring workspaces that take people back to human
emotions, by feeling comfortable, connected with nature, and being in contact with their loved ones.

Business Model
The app would dive deep into providing details on amenities for freelancers smooth sailing between work and life. It would possibly
provide reasonable packages for parents to book their desk space and qualified childcare/pet care on pay-as-you-go-basis.

Methodology & Analysis

With the initial research done, I structured the survey questions to find out what the user would require in a workspace that allowed them to
bring their children or a pet to work. I had to explore where the user pain points are, and how we resolve this when creating a value
proposition for the app. With so many different aggregators of co-working spaces, this had to be the one that is truly focused on the
working parent.

The survey was conducted for two sets of target audiences : 1) 30 Freelancer parents working from home 2) 6 Pet owners who are
freelancers working from home. Their age ranges between 25-55 years old. The questionnaire was developed in a Microsoft word file and
circulated to share their views. As the sampling method is tricky in this kind of study, I mainly focussed on snowball sampling. This
process is mainly involved in gathering contact information of their friends or acquaintance working as freelancers. So as to make the study
more controlled, we restricted our data collection to the freelancers who has a kid or a pet.

The questions and results from our online survey are shown below :

30 Freelancer parents working from home

Age breakdown of freelancer parents Years of experience as a freelancer

Previous job profile before taking up freelancing job Work status as a freelancer

Reason to pursue a freelancing job Work satisfaction level at home

If at all not satisfied working at home, Would you recommend an app for accessing all
then why do you still choose to work at home ? the workspaces in and around the city with
amenities particularly designed for freelancers

How do you think working in a co work space would alter your workstyle ?
Feel less isolated
Have increased business network
Rise in productivity
Increased self confidence
Meaningful personal life
Good Health
Good team work
Good Income
Increase in Social circle

Interesting responses from quantitative research.

After the maternity leave,

50% 25% 50% 100%

of the respondents of the freelancers said freelancers showed
of the freelancer parents their willingness for an
working from home took couldn't join back to that working from
office due to their home has reduced their app that would help
freelancing as an alternative them find a workspace
option. personal commitments. productivity to a great
extent. with amenities
desirable for them.

a) Compromising parenthood According to freelancers, working in a co

b) Unaffordability of a child care facility, are workspace will impact them positively at three
the two major concerns that restricted levels : having a meaningful personal life, rise
freelancers from taking up a full time job. in work productivity and increased
collaborations/ network.

**** Apart from 30 freelancer parents, I interviewed 6 pet parents. All the six pet parents owned a dog.
All these parents raised their concern over leaving the pets at home. From the interviews conducted we
have jotted down three major concerns here as follow:

Pet dogs get sad, depressed, Pet boardings are expensive if Pet sitters are expensive and also
lethargic and withdrawn, when left left the pets for an hourly basis. there is an issue of trust worthiness
alone for a long period of time. of leaving a house with the pet.

Personas
After the quantitative research (survey), we then carried out a one-on-one interview with five freelancers (three females and two males).
Out of the five members, one is unmarried who is staying with a pet dog and all fours members are married with one kid. Their age ranges
between 25-55 years old. The data is restricted to Bangalore city.

The key findings from the interviews are condensed into three personas.

**A concerned mother who wants to pursue her career without compromising parenthood.

**A concerned father who wants to balance fatherhood and work.

**A concerned pet lover who wants her furry friend around during her work time.

Empathy Mapping
Based on the personas, we created an empathy map that helped us empathize and synthesize our observations from the research phase.
Penning down users perspectives and surroundings opinion drew out few unexpected insights about our users needs and their decisions.

Customer Journey Map

Using the personas and the empathy map, we tried to map the journey of our persona, Kavita. The journey would allow us to make sense of
what our user goes through.

Kavita hears about this new app, Fable hub and wonders if this app can be a one-stop solution to all her worries. So she downloads and
installs the app and takes her share of ride.

Kavita's interaction with the app starts with a lot of anxiousness but when she tries to get details about the process, the direction of the
story changes. She finds what she expects and her journey ends at a happy note.

Revelation
During the process, we recognized that we need to separate out freelancers need from the remaining traffic. Therefore, before availing any
membership plan/ discounts/ offers, our app should make sure if the user is a freelancer or not.
The aggregated offers of economic workspaces can be availed after a successful verification of legitimate users. To attain that, we added an
additional feature "verification process" where the user upload their documents to verify their identity. On the successful verification, the
user may book membership offers/discounts designed for the freelancers, else the users are directed to the offers/discounts designed for
non-freelancers.

Ideation

Information Architecture
Information architecture helped us to organize content and brought more clarity to the purpose of the app.

Task flow

Task flows were created keeping in mind below mentioned four possible actions, a freelancer and a non-freelancer would take to complete
the task of booking a workspace using Fable hub.

** How do a freelancer navigate to book a space using freelancers profile

During the booking, the user has to verify and validate his/her identity as a freelancer. On the successful verification, they are directed to
the offers/discounts specially designed for freelancers.

** How do a freelancer navigate to book a space using non-freelancers profile.

Freelancers are free to explore workspace options of non-freelancers, but they will be directed to offers/discounts specially designed for
non-freelancers.

** How do a non freelancer navigate to book a space using non-freelancers profile.

Non-freelancers can dwell in interesting workspace options and book their desk with membership options available for them.

** What happens when a non freelancer tries to books a space using freelancers profile.
Here, the process becomes a bit tricky for the non-freelancers. Once the space is liked and booked, they are asked to verify their identity by
submitting certain documents. On the failed verification, non-freelancers are directed to a screen with offers/discounts designed for non-
freelancers.

Features highlighted in Fable Hub

The techniques, tools and methodologies used to investigate users and their
requirements revealed few valuable information that can be fed in to the design
process.

Personalized Search Predictive Search

Provides a separate banner for freelancers,
which will take the users to explore workspaces
with specially allocated discounts/offers for the
freelancers.
The filter options project facilities for child care
and amenities in workspace to choose from. On
selecting the filter options the app will show the
ensemble of possible workspaces from the list
of facilities it has aggregated. This would help
the users to navigate through and find what they
want easily.

Verification screen Date-time Slot

Anyone exploring workspaces through Calender and time slots are designed for
freelancers personalized search, undergo maximum customisation. Freelancers can book
verification for validating their identity. In this the space for an hour, day, week and month.
way a legitimate user does not miss out on any
freelancers privileges.

Design

Sketching
Sketching helped me to take my imaginative clouds to the user interface screen, where I could start thinking
about how my app will work to get the desired result. It has also allowed me to visualize how I would want my
users interact screen-to-screen, which is something that is visible and becomes clearer in user interface form.

Onboarding

Home Screen Sign up - Sign in

Workspace details Workspace - Booking

Date-Time

Verification Payment

Low fidelity wireframes

After many rounds of review, the sketching has taken the below showcased forms for low fidelity wireframes. At this phase, we
brainstormed more on screens like freelancer verification portal, thorough filtration options etc. to address the crux of issue, which also
stand as our USP for the product.

Usability testing

Methodology
Modability

Due to pandemic crisis we had to conduct Remote usability

testing. The prototyped Adobe XD link was circulated with our
potential participants and asked them to fulfill the task.

Number of test participants

We conducted usability testing on four sets of users :

Three working fathers
Five working mothers

Tasks

Book an app to search a workspace that provide child and pet

care facilities.

Usability Questionarrie

Once the participant completed the usability test, a likert scale was
provided to gather feedback on the usability of the app.

How easy was to find your preferred coworkspace from the

classification created?

Very Easy Easy Neutral Difficult Very Difficult

How would you evaluate the booking process of coworkspace ?

Very Easy Easy Neutral Difficult Very Difficult

Considering the aim of the app, are the filter options sufficient enough
for the customization of coworkspaces.

Yes No

If No, please provide your inputs.

Rate the relevance of verification process during the booking of the

coworkspace.

Very relevant Relevant Somewhat Somewhat irrelevant Mostly

relevant irrelevant irrelevant

Rate your experience with the apps navigation.

Best Better Good Worse Worst

Key Takeaways

What works

Users could easily navigate to their required and preferred child

friendly space.
They appreciate being able to reserve a space in four simple steps :
select a space, select date, make payment and confirm.
The verification process to know if the user purchasing a space is a
freelancer or not has been acknowledged as a highlight of this app.

Key Takeaways

Areas of improvement

Both the working mothers expect a person-in-charge to take care of

their kids homework, outdoor activities and a nanny for infants.
Precisely, they expect these options to be highlighted in the filter
section, so that the users can opt as per their wish.
The workspace detail page should be more transparent about the
facilities provided for children's entertainment and comfort. While on
this page, the working fathers expected information such as food
menu, collection of books and games. They also expected to find
profile of the nanny/caretaker at the child care centre.
The lack of explicit information on the workspace left them with a
confusion that they may need to call the concerned workspace and
enquire more about childcare facilities during the booking process.
The app was mainly prototyped keeping in mind to fulfill the basic
task of booking a workspace. However, users were interested in other
features of the app that they did not get to use during the completion
of the designation task.
1) To see the profile information after the login page
2) To save preferences
3) Possibility to modify existing bookings
4) Avail offers and discounts
5) Avail promotion codes

UX recommendations

On the workspace detail page, we will make the text 'child care' and
'pet care' as call to action buttons. This will direct the user to a page
with detailed information about the activities and care takers profile
at the child care and pet care centres respectively.

Reference
Van Meel, J., & Vos, P. (2001). Funky offices: Reflections on office design in the ‘new economy’. Journal of
Corporat Real Estate, 3(4), 322–334.

Ketting, J. R. (2014). Het bedrijfsverzamelgebouw: een onderzoek naar de toegevoegde waarde van
bedrijfsverzamelgebouwen (Master’s thesis). TU Delft, Delft.

Gibson, V. A., & Lizieri, C. M. (1999). The role of serviced office space in office markets and corporate
property portfolios. Reading: University of Reading.

Laterveer, M. (2011). Serviced offices; een dynamische markt in opkomst (Master’s thesis). Universiteit
Utrecht, Utrecht.

Sykes, K. (2014). Coworking: A workplace paradigm shift. Contract, 55(6), 140–145.

Capdevila, I. (2013). Knowledge dynamics in localized communities: Spaces as microclusters. Retrieved from
http:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=241412.

Parrino, L. (2015). Coworking: Assessing the role of proximity knowledge exchange. Knowledge Management
Research and Practice, 13, 261–271.

Deijl, C. M. (2011). Two heads are better than one, a case study of the co-working community in the
Netherlands (Master’s thesis). Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam.

Moriset, B. (2013). Building new places of the creative economy, the rise of coworking spaces. Proceedings of
the 2nd geography of innovation international conference 2013. Utrecht University.

Rothe, P., Lindholm, A.-L., Hyvönen, A., & Nenonen, S. (2011). User preferences of office occupiers:
Investigating the differences. Journal of Corporate Real Estate, 13(2), 81–97.

Deskmag. (2015). The 5th Global Coworking Survey. Retrieved from http://www.deskmag.com/en/first-
results-of-thenewglobal-coworking-survey-2015-16.

Remøy, H., & Van der Voordt, T. (2013). Adaptability – How to accommodate changing user preferences.
Paper presented at European Real Estate Society Conference, Vienna, Austria.

Thank you for reading !