Enter: Delighting Office Visitors
The Problem
Many small companies don’t have full-time receptionists. When visitors enter the office, they often feel rushed, nervous, and uncomfortable, and there is no one to make them feel better. Further, they might not even be able to put a face to the voice on the phone or the name on an email. While working at Fresh Tilled Soil, I designed a solution that would bring comfort and delight to the office entry experience.
Relevant Skills
- Ideation and sketching
- Prototyping and iteration
- End-to-end product development
- Connected digital and physical experiences
- Animation
- iOS Development
My Role
I was given end-to-end responsibility for this product. It would be my job to identify the right solution, design and test prototypes, and implement the final product in code.
Research
Having conducted extensive research on the Fresh Tilled Soil client experience and produced an experience map, I was aware that the experience of entering the office was subpar. However, after deciding to focus specifically on the entry experience, I conducted additional interviews and observational research. It became clear that people want and need a few things when they arrive here for the first time. They need:
- to feel like they were anticipated
- the confidence that someone knows that they have arrived
- snacks, refreshment, amenities
- a place to go once they’ve walked in
- to be received quickly by the right person
Conceiving a Solution
To resolve these pain points, I conceived of a welcome kiosk that would allow visitors to check in, let them know that someone was on the way, and provide information about where to wait and what amenities were available to them. This product became known as Enter.
“The solution was not just an app, but an integration with the entryway itself.”
We added a “welcome table” with snacks, refreshments, gum, and other useful items to sate and soothe the weary traveler, and would use the app to direct visitors to the otherwise-ambiguous waiting areas.
Sketching and Early Iteration
I started designing the interface by sketching out different ways users could interact with the app. After collecting feedback and running some user tests with low fidelity prototypes, I felt ready to start building so we could conduct further tests and make improvements. The initial design was intended to pull from the company calendar and present the names of expected visitors so that they could check in when they arrived. This was an attempt to solve the first of the above-listed needs: to make visitors feel anticipated.
User Feedback and a Change of Plans
After testing, I learned that people were uncomfortable with their names being presented so publicly, especially when multiple meetings with different teams were taking place at the same time. This was an important "back to the drawing board" moment.
After some more sketching and ideation, I moved to a design in which people check in by selecting who they had come to see. When a visitor checks in, the app sends a text message to the person or people that the visitor is there to see. It then informs the visitor that the relevant people have been notified and will be with them shortly, encouraging them to enjoy the refreshments nearby, and to comfortably wait on the couch.
Further observation revealed that sending messages to Fresh Tilled Soil team members made them users as well, and they had needs too. It quickly became clear that text message alerts didn’t work for everyone. During the work day, many people silence their phones or just put them away to avoid distraction. Fresh Tilled Soil used Slack for internal communication, so I updated Enter with a Slack integration. In both of these cases, I let the users guide the product's development, not the other way around.
Implementing Polish and Delight
Building the experience as a native iPad app afforded me complete control over the look, feel, and content I was creating. It also made it very easy to interface with any APIs I needed during ongoing product development.
Visitors need more than just words on a screen to feel welcome, so Enter was designed with animations to provide a warm, high-class welcome to the office. In particular, I incorporated gentle animations as tap affordances, as feedback, and simply to make the experience delightful.
I used a breath animation on the welcome screen to create a feeling of calm and to train users to step through the app.
All page changes were animated to make the experience feel smooth and expensive.
Here, animation provides feedback to the user that their selection was received, and color links the selection to the meaning of the "Check In" button.
Finally, I noticed that laying out employees in a grid meant that the user was sometimes left confronting empty spaces. To address this, I curated a list of design- and business-related quotes that appear randomly in the app to fill empty space and provide additional satisfaction.
Positive Feedback and Productization
Enter had been built as an internal tool to improve the entry experience at Fresh Tilled Soil. However, clients soon started asking if they could have their own. Sensing an opportunity, I began the process of productizing Enter; creating an account system, incorporating a cloud backend, and making logos, employee names, colors, and text all customizable. These changes greatly increased the complexity of what had been an otherwise simple codebase, but it was worth it. Soon, dozens of companies were using Enter to welcome and delight visitors to their offices too. Enter is available now.
““It’s beautiful. I really love it. Insanely intuitive. It’s a great user experience that has solved a major problem for Startup Institute.””