SafeOffice
SafeOffice is an enterprise solution designed to help organizations seamlessly manage the return-to-office process post-COVID.
UX UI designer, UX researcher
My Role
3 months
Timeline
Tools
The Problem
As companies transitioned back to in-office work post-COVID, they faced significant challenges in managing a safe and efficient return. Employees needed clarity and ease in planning their office visits, while organizations required a centralized system to monitor occupancy, enforce policies, and ensure compliance across multiple locations. Without an integrated solution, businesses risked operational inefficiencies, safety concerns, and employee frustration.
The Goals
We want to create an enterprise solution to streamline the return-to-office process by providing a seamless experience for employees and a powerful management system for organizations. The goal was to create a frictionless, scalable solution that enabled employees to easily plan and book office visits while giving enterprise management teams the tools to monitor, manage, and optimize workplace re-entry effectively.
Empathize and Discover
To create a solution that effectively supports both employees and enterprise management teams, I followed a human-centered design approach, starting with user research and stakeholder collaboration. Through user interviews, workshops, we gathered insights into their pain points, behaviors, and expectations.
User Research: Gaining Insights from Key Stakeholders
I conducted in-depth interviews with six users from two user groups. Through these interviews, we identified common pain points and challenges:
Employees
Those returning to the office, needing a smooth, stress-free process.
Enterprise management
Including crisis management and office management responsible for policy enforcement, occupancy tracking, and workplace safety.
Personas: Defining Our Key Users
Based on our research insights, we created two personas to represent our primary user groups: employees returning to the office and enterprise management teams overseeing the process. These personas helped us stay user-focused throughout the design process, ensuring that SafeOffice addressed the unique needs, pain points, and goals of both employees and management.
Define
After gathering insights from user interviews and workshops, we moved into the Define phase to establish a clear direction for the solution. This phase focused on prioritizing user needs, defining the MVP scope, and identifying core features that would address the most pressing challenges for both employees and enterprise management teams.
A Two-fold Solution
From our research, it became clear that employees and enterprise management teams had distinct needs, requiring a solution that served both groups effectively. To address this, SafeOffice was designed as a two-fold system, ensuring seamless coordination between employees returning to the office and management teams overseeing the process.
Mobile app for employees
A user-friendly mobile application that provides employees a frictionless experience that simplifies the transition back to the office.
Command center for management
A web-based dashboard for enterprise teams to manage the organization’s return-to-office flow.
Define MVP Scope
Given the complexity of return-to-office management, we had to define what to build first and what could be addressed in future iterations. To do this, we follow the below process.
Key Features
The critical insights into the needs, pain points, and behaviors of users I gained through research helped us to define the core features for our MVP. We prioritized those essential functionalities that can not only deliver immediate value but also aligns closely with the users’ expectations.
Plan and go
Employees book specific time and location to go back to office.
Safety and health screening capacity embedded when booking.
Touch-less check in experience.
Invite guests safely in app.
Helpful resources in one place
Updated global and local safety protocols and guidelines.
Real-time office alerts and notifications
Other support channels
Local facility feature
Support employee booking and using local spaces like meeting rooms, lounge, and etc.
A feedback channel for reporting issues.
Command center
A back end command center for management to monitor and control room capacity.
Allow management to update and push timely notification.
Allow management to collect feedback and take timely actions.
Ideate and Design
After defined the scope with prioritized features based on my research insights, I transitioned into the ideate and design phase, where I began exploring various design solutions to bring the core features to life.
User Flow
I first mapped out the ideal happy path of our employees returning to office and used that as the guidance to design final experience and interface.
Establishing Visual Identity
After finalizing the core UX solutions, we defined the visual branding to create a consistent, intuitive, and engaging user experience. This included selecting a color palette, typography, and UI components to reflect SafeOffice’s brand identity and usability goals.
Delivered Solution
In this stage, I finalized the high-fidelity design for SafeOffice, ensuring a seamless experience for both employees and enterprise management teams.
Plan and Go
A robust booking experience that is easy to use and allow smart capacity control and safety control for returning to office process.
Book access ahead of time
The intuitive booking module allows users to select date and time slot to arrive at a specific office, which also informs the capacity planning and management onsite.
Ensured compliance to protocols
The screening questionnaire requires users to self declare COVID negative before granting them access to return to office. This flexible capability allows admin users to modify the screening metrics based on local guidelines.
Touch-less check-in process
I designed a QR code driven check-in approach to maintain a touch-less process for best safety. It also can be used in integration with other systems as one of the pre-conditions for badge functioning.
Invite guest safely
The "Add My Guest" feature allows employees to register visitors with precautionary measures in place, ensuring compliance with office policies. I designed the interface to prioritize key information and guide users step-by-step, making the process seamless. This feature also helps office management monitor access, enforce capacity limits, and communicate safety updates in real time.
Stay Informed and Safe
The app provides multiple channels for users to stay informed with right content at right time, and other powerful supporting features to ensure “safety first” practice.
All helpful resources in one place
COVID news and protocols gets updated everyday during the special period which makes it critical for people to stay tuned and informed to be able to protect themselves and others, especially for people working in a shared space. Safe Office provides a central hub to surface easy-to-digest, simple, official documentation around safety protocols locally and globally, how-to guides to assist needs of workers and monitors, and much more robust supporting features for anything employees may need onsite. I decided to divide the content into 2 separate modules, Info and Help, to display different types of information. It helps users to find and navigate to right content more easily.
Info module - structured and curated local and global content to keep users informed and encourage “safety first” practices.
Help module - provides more support resources in office, regional and national areas at fingertips.
Local Facility Features
We selected a few key spaces for MVP to create a smart experience for employees to use safely. Our goal is to use the digital experience to fulfill user’s needs through safe measures, establish a communication channel to capture user’s concerns, and allow management to respond quickly to requests and keep all spaces up to Covid-free standard.
Use local facility safely
The spaces prioritized for MVP are canteen, lounge, restroom and elevator, which were selected based on the feedback I learned through user research. I designed the Spaces module to surface all the facility related features, with clear categorization for easy navigation. The interface and content is dynamic and personalized depending on each office, considering their different type of spaces, amount of people onsite, limited number of support staff, to enable employees get to use the facility safely through meaningful user flows and intuitive interfaces.
Canteen experience - seamless booking experience to make dining safe for everyone.
Report issue - one tap to report any safety or sanity issue in office.
Easy Manage with Command Center
Command center enables enterprise management, such as onsite office manager, crisis manager and HR to easily monitor bookings and capacity, with role-based control access.
Evolving Beyond the MVP & Expanding Impact
Following the successful launch of SafeOffice, we continued to evolve the solution based on user feedback and real-world implementation data. We introduced new enhancements, including advanced analytics, deeper integrations with enterprise tools, and AI-driven occupancy predictions, to further optimize workplace management.
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