Elevating the Room Booking App Experience

The client

Workspace provides flexible offices, co-working spaces, and meeting rooms. Established in 1987, the company was an early entrant into the now-familiar flexible office space market, and was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1993. Today, Workspace boasts an impressive portfolio of over 60 locations, covering the length and breadth of the UK capital.

Among its many selling points – including a Net Zero commitment and wellbeing programme – is the community vibe that connects like-minded individuals to networking and growth opportunities. What’s more, Workspace gives customers the freedom to do whatever they want with their space. Unlike other office providers, customers get a blank canvas that offers infinite creative potential for personalisation and growth.

Our brief 

Thousands of businesses rely on Workspace for flexible office space across the capital. Yet, with the market heating up, the company knew it had to provide a flexible working app that streamlined the room-booking journey.

Given its busy client base of dynamic working professionals and young start-ups, mobile was a key channel. Unfortunately, its existing room booking app was poorly optimised. Due to its unique service model, Workspace knew that an off-the-shelf solution wouldn’t meet its requirements or deliver the curated community experience it was known for. 

Instead, Workspace wanted a digital product development agency that took a holistic business view, used market research insights and understood its growth potential. The company reached out to Future Platforms as its strategic partner. As an award-winning digital product development agency, we have the experience and skills to deliver intuitive customer experiences that build loyalty.

Here, we were principally tasked with building an app to book meeting rooms. However, we also wanted to conduct comprehensive stakeholder research to understand how to elevate the room booking app experience. Doing so would allow Workspace to continue standing out in an increasingly crowded market of competing flexible working apps.

What we delivered

Any digital product development agency knows the power of market research. That’s why we began by conducting stakeholder research from existing users and senior leaders at Workspace to understand the current and future state of the flexible working app. From our research, it became clear that there were two main pain points that the room booking app needed to solve:

• Customer frustration: The booking process was too complex and failed to show the availability, features, location and amenities of Workspaces rooms. 
• Business frustration: Customers often fell short of using their contract’s full capacity and weren’t aware of what they could achieve with Workspace’s rooms. So, Workspace needed a new strategy to retain users long-term.

We started by creating a room booking app that enhanced search abilities, giving users new ways to filter for the spaces they wanted. This included parameters like building type, map views, room size, amenities, and more. Under the new system, users could seamlessly book and pay using the meeting room booking app while leveraging community features to connect with other tenants at the same time. 

We also added new features to capture relevant customer data and gather behavioural insights. This not only allowed Workspace to educate tenants on using their contracts to the fullest but also helped the company evolve its flexible working app into the future.

Throughout, we used Kotlin multiplatform which allowed us to build a scalable digital framework that could then be exported into fully optimised room booking apps with ease. In particular, the composable architecture meant we could simplify the project by centralising development features between Android and iOS and keep costs low at the same time.

Support

Future Platforms is an award-winning digital product design agency. As such, we can support the entire product development lifecycle. Using our three-pillar approach, we combine a holistic design approach with engineering excellence to deliver comprehensive digital strategies to our clients. 

In addition to a newly-designed room booking app, we equipped Workspace with a long-term customer loyalty strategy. Using the insights from our market research, we identified how the company could boost its community offering and built a product roadmap outlining the future of its flexible working app. 

Equally, we provided a maintenance and reporting service throughout all of the digital product development work. As a result, Workspace had access to regular reporting on the project. This helped us flag potential issues before they became critical and ensured we delivered key project milestones to schedule. 

The maintenance contract also included SLAs covering response times and service restoration targets. These were both covered by service credits should we fail to respond or deliver to expectations, but neither were enacted. Moreover, to ensure well-defined and well-planned work, we used our standard process of Discover, Define and Deliver. This ensured budgets could be planned and approved based on known deliverables. 

We worked on time and materials, with regular open reporting on past and forecasted burn which helped to allocate resources more efficiently. Finally, we used agile scrum boards to provide Workspace with added visibility across each project milestone before it began.

Since its launch, thousands of Workspace customers have downloaded the flexible working app and begun booking rooms on a regular basis. In turn, the seemingly simple room booking app has become a leading revenue driver for the client. 

The composable architecture ensures Workspace can evolve its customer experience in response to real user behaviours and build long-term loyalty at the same time. Combined, the bespoke solution has garnered an impressive 4.9-star rating on the App Store. 

To learn more about our services and solutions, including what we can do for you, get in touch today.