TOG Workspace prospects

TOG Office and Coworking prospects

As a result of the Blackstone group acquiring 75% shares of The Office Group, the Business entered in a digital transformation phase to evolve the company to a higher stage of experience design maturity.

Up to that point The Office Group only had an assumptive understanding of their users‘ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals.

The challenge

The most mature companies are those which, since the beginning of their activity, have constituted the customer-centric approach as the core of their philosophy and operate through it.

The aim of the research was to:

Gain a richer understanding of who those customers are, what they need, their motivations and how they decide where to rent.
Elicit customer-driven design principles and jobs-to-be-done to help the redesign of the TOG’s website.

My role

Lead on the research to fully map customers’ persona, journey maps, job-to-be-done and from those fully redesign of the TOG’s website (separate case study).

Discovery phase – Proto-persona workshop

Typically in every Business there is lots of knowledge about their customers, it is often scattered and frequently assumptive, however, it is there and it’s worth collecting it with the aim of validating it after. TOG was no different, so I started from there.

I started off with a couple of workshops, one with the Sales team and the Building Managers, the other with Marketing and Contact center. With these group I was able to get the teams excited about the work and to quickly draw-up proto-personas ready for validation.

I asked the participants to group the information as follows:

Goals: Why are they looking for an office space?
Tasks: How are they looking for it?
Feelings: What is on their mind when looking for an office space?
Influences: What is going on behind the scenes?
Pain Points: What obstacles keep them from achieving their goals?

Pictured: A proto-persona template and the completed version (with priority stickers) derived from the workshop.

Validating proto-persona via one-to-one interviews

One-hour interviews were undertaken with 30 participants spread equally across three key market segments of workspace rental:

Large Businesses: renting offices with more than 25 desks
SMEs: renting offices with fewer than 25 desks
Coworkers: renting a desk in shared coworking space (dedicated or hotdesk)

Participants in each group represented an even spread of Finance, Professional services and Technology businesses, of which only a handful were TOG customers.

The interviews were held at TOG Henry Wood House and livestreamed to project stakeholders and team members. The interviews largely followed the following structure:

About the participant, their job and the company they work for
The reasons and requirements for a new office space
The office research process, focusing on the online part
Office visits and final decision

During the last 10–15 minutes participants were asked to comment on and review how they found competitors’ websites and existing office search engines, and to feedback on what photos and information was most/least useful to them.

Pictured: The user research observation room streaming the session at TOG Henry Wood House, along with the insights wall organised in participants’ swimlanes.

Observation room at TOG Henry Wood House

Identifying key themes via Affinity mapping workshop

After each group of participants had been interviewed, an affinity mapping workshop was held to identify key themes that were evident across multiple participants.

This involved TOG stakeholders working together to cluster Post-its into related categories such as common types of requirement of workspace, or what photos are important.

Pictured: The participants ‘factoids’ aggregated by emerging key themes.

Putting it all together – Prospect Office Customer persona

From the affinity mapping sessions I could identify three clear personas:

Office extender – Alison, 27, Office Manager, Large Financial Business
Office replacer – Bryan, 38, CEO, Small recruitment firm
Serious start-up coworker – Carla, 42, Co-founder of a micro-marketing agency

These personas were subsequently validated through a large survey with over 300 respondents, 100 per each identifed persona.

Pictured: One of the identified Office customer persona

Evolving Personas to Experience maps – Scenario mapping workshop

Once the Persona documents were complete, I organised a follow-up session at TOG’s dev-agency office to create a guide to what personas are doing, thinking, and feeling in different situations.

This session was particularly helpful for the entire team (including developers) to familiarise with the research findings, help me map customer scenarios and start to think possible solutions for each of them.

Pictured below: Scenario mapping workshop