ATICCO HUB
An internal communications system for the fastest-growing co-working space in Spain.
CONTEXT
Aticco is the biggest co-working space in Barcelona, Spain. Its 4 buildings across the city house more than 2,000 co-workers who range from digital nomads to employees of fast-growing start-ups.
During my 6 months at Aticco, I mainly worked on Aticco Hub, a webpage that serves as an internal social platform which helps people build connections, as well as a resource for co-workers to navigate the co-working space and book add-on services if needed.
MY ROLE
UX/UI design, product management, data analytics
TOOLS
Sketch, Figma, Google Analytics, Invision
PROBLEM DISCOVERED
A few weeks after we launched the product, we noticed that only 20% of the co-workers at Aticco had signed up for Hub. This is wildly different from our expectation of a 80% sign-up rate, since we sent out an invitation for everyone to sign-up. After some casual conversations with the co-workers, we realized that many of them either didn’t know of the existence of Hub, or asked us why they should bother to sign up for it.
EXPLORING THE PROBLEM
In order to figure out what exactly has gone wrong with our product, we interviewed several users and carried out a quantitative analysis in order to understand the user behaviors.
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
We made the following observations based on visitor data from Google Analytics.
80%
of visitors visit only 2 pages:
home and meeting room
71.5%
of visitors land and spend on average 2 min on the home/log-in page
13.6%
of visitors land on the meeting room page, and the bounce rate for meeting room is 80%
The numbers suggest that:
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1. The home page and meeting room page are the most visited and most landed pages.
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2. A huge number of users only visit the meeting room page to book a room and then leave.
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3. Since users spend on average 2min on the home page, it becomes crucial to interact and engage with the visitors there. Consequently, the home page design should be more informative and engaging and help direct traffic to other pages that receive less visitors.
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
After interviewing 5 co-workers ranging from freelancers to employees of small and established startups, we realized 2 major problems with our product.
1. WEAK LAUNCH
Hub was launched through an email announcement. However, many interviewees pointed out that they never read the email because Aticco emails often receive the lowest priority.
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The email also only announced the launch without fully explaining its functions and highlighting the value propositions. Hence it failed to convince users why they should bother to check it out.
2. LOW VISIBILITY
Other than the marketing and engineering team who designed Hub, other teams at Aticco are not really promoting Hub to co-workers, even though teams such as the community builders are co-workers’ first, and sometimes only, point of contact. In addition, although we had designed features such as event marketing and interest-based group chats that would help other teams with their tasks, they still continue to use alternatives such as Facebook groups and Whatsapp messages.
USER CASES
Since we have mainly 3 types of co-workers at Aticco - freelancers/digital nomads, employees of companies with under 20 people, and employees of established companies - we looked at the behaviors and incentives to use Hub of each of these groups.
EMPLOYEES OF LARGE COMPANIES
Since they come in with a set group of friends from their own company, they don’t really need to rely on the social connections that Aticco offers. In addition, they also don’t need the practical functions of Hub such as booking a meeting room, because their company usually rent out an entire floor with facilities already in place.
EMPLOYEES OF SMALL COMPANIES
They constitute the majority of current active users on Hub, because they frequently need to book meeting rooms. Nevertheless, few of them browse beyond the meeting room page. Unlike employees of large companies, they like to mingle with other co-workers to extend their personal and professional network.
DIGITAL NOMADS AND FREELANCERS
They usually have no need to book meeting rooms. However, they do value the social component of a co-working space, hence could be incentivized to use the social features on Hub.
PRIORITIZING THE PROBLEM
Through a meeting with the engineering, marketing and community building team, we leveraged our disposable resources and expertise and prioritized the problems we want to solve based on their potential impact.
We agreed that there are a few problems that can be solved by a better cross-team collaboration :
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1. The community builders will transition from Facebook to Hub to promote their events and also teach co-workers how to find events and resources on Hub.
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2. The marketing team will find more ways to take co-workers from the newsletter onto Hub, e.g plug in invitation links.
There are 2 other problems that require some tweaks to the web design:
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1. Lack of engagement with pages other than the home page and meeting room.
2. Lack of incentive on the part of users from large companies to use Hub
SOLUTIONS
A BRAND NEW HOME PAGE
Since most users land first and spend around 2min on average on the home page, displaying everything at one glance will help direct users from the home page to other less-visited pages. Hover on the image to see more!
3 cups
Blueberries
The business development and community building teams could also benefit from the added space on the home page to publish their events and services, in turn facilitate their interactions with the co-workers.
Integrating all channels of communication in Hub makes distributing information more efficient than just weekly email newsletters, especially since many co-workers report that they don’t really check emails from Aticco.
STRENGTHEN HUB'S SOCIAL FUNCTION
Help people make personal and professional connections, thus creating an incentive for everyone to use Hub.
All co-workers that we interviewed, from digital nomads to employees of large companies, point out that the best thing about working at a co-working space, especially at Aticco compared to other co-working spaces in Barcelona, is the tight-nit community and human connections. Based on this fact, we decide to amplify this social aspect by creating more ways and making it easier for people to connect and collaborate.
Easily searchable user profiles sorted by interests
Individual user profile displaying skills, expertise and interests
Therefore, we also decided to recreate the community page. Our previous design only asks a user to write a short bio and input their basic information such as name and contact info on their profile. However, this way of presentation doesn’t show a co-worker’s expertise, interest areas, and other information that could help people connect and collaborate professionally. We have also learned from the community builders that co-workers often ask around for professional help and lack a channel to search for project collaborators. As a result, we revamped the way professional profiles are presented and created a new on-boarding questionnaire on Typeform in hopes to present more relevant information and facilitate search.
This solution creates value for all three types of users to use Hub — make personal and professional connections and grow their businesses. It also serves to solidify Aticco’s main value proposition — the human connections it provides, and help everyone thrive in the Aticco ecosystem.
RESULTS AND IMPACT
Thanks to the joint effort from the marketing, engineering and community building team, the newly designed Hub achieved a 40% increase in new users and 20% in daily active users over 2 months.
DESIGN SCREENSHOTS
