Roman P - RocketSpace Apps

Three day design sprint

We started the project with a compressed three day sprint to establish the MVP at RocketSpace headquarters in San Francisco. We interviewed RocketSpace stakeholders and members to establish priorities. After going through several sorting and wireframing excercises we settled on an MVP statement:

“Members should be able to enter the building with bluetooth, book meeting rooms, invite visitors, and register for events.”

Using our MVP statement, we quickly mocked up a clickable wireframe prototype that showed core functionality to the RocketSpace stakeholders. The visuals helped align everyone on the functional and technical requirements, and helped everyone accurately plan for a five month sprint to build the app.

Wireframing

Early wireframes explored a room calendar to book rooms, but it was deemed too complicated to build or use. The team decided to build a room booking ‘wizard’ based on a few key parameters which allowed a user to see all future rooms in order of availability and features.

Initial room booking scenarios tried recreating a calendar, but the team quickly aligned on a simplified 'wizard' for finding rooms available based on a few parameters.

Prototyping and testing

We tested a clickable Proto.io prototype with 10 RocketSpace members. Since the app required several permissions, our research showed a strong preference for progressive permission asking based on user's tasks. The testing also showed a preference for exposed navigation at the bottom and a wish list of things beyond our scope, which we captured for the client’s backlog for future versions.

User testing happened for 2 days at the RocketSpace campus in San Francisco and confirmed the MVP hypothesis. The testing also revealed a strong preference for an exposed navigation.

Wireframing and IA

In early sprints, the dev team wanted to see an information architecture for the whole app. Since we were pressed for time we decided to synthesize our wireframes with an information architecture map, which allowed us to work on both in parallel. I documented the techinque on Medium and it's proven to be a successul method of managing the two workstreams. By the tenth revision and fourth sprint we had finalized the MVP information architecture.

The wireframes went through 9 revisions within a complete IA map

Brand and visual design

Brand guidelines from RocketSpace

RocketSpace's brand guidelines favored space exploration imagery with geometric patterns. We incorporated the bold typography iconography, and the occasional space image.

The final icon set for both apps.

The London RocketSpace campus

Prototyping refinements

In the initial Book a Room design, each available time slot would be a discreet room result. When connected to the API, we found that one room with varying times could repeat itself closely together, leading to confusion. A prototype helped demonstrate a better solution where all open slots were bundled in a carousel.

A quick prototype demonstrated an improved room selection model.

Onboarding animations

A simple series of animations helped visitors understand how to enter the building, books rooms, get notifications, and invite visitors. These animations were first drawn out as a sequence of pictures and then animated in Hype 3.

“…amazing job done by the team at Luxoft with special thanks to the team Jeremy, Jody, Roman, Ilya, Andrii, Dmitry, Dmitriy, Michael & Sergii …You all did an amazing job of delivering an MVP in just over 3 months on two platforms. An agile team sticking to it's burn down from Sprint 1 and hitting the delivered date is a credit to your skill and passion.”

- Ed Cortis, RocketSpace CTO