<aside> 👩🏽‍💻 Currently involved helping people find flexible works by choosing where and when they want to work. Assessing and validating new concepts, prototypes and products to build the new age of staffing platforms.

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Role

Lead Product (UX & UI) and Service Designer

Responsibilities

Research

Ideation

Visual Design

Brand Identity Design

UX/UI Design

Prototyping

Testing

Summary

Late last year, I started my journey as a digital nomad. Since my job gives me the freedom to work from anywhere in the world (as long as I can be connected to the internet for most of the time) it also gives me the ability to be online working alongside my colleagues simultaneously on projects. Since then, I’ve been visiting and further exploring different countries; meeting interesting individuals from various cultures and ethnicities. Making memories with them helps me to learn from them and explore new ideas that I apply to my daily work as a product designer. Previously I have written about the pros and cons of being a digital wanderer and how it has affected the way I work here.

But the truth is that these last months, I’ve met and discussed the topic of where do digital nomads and remote workers spend their working hours from, being most of the time their apartments living room or the hotel room if they are in a city where they don’t live in. This made me think about how could a tool help these people look for a good environment and affordable spaces where they could spend their time working in their projects, businesses or simply in front of a computer with the commodities of a good workplace.

This is when Nomadik was born, after the idea of creating a platform where digital nomads and remote workers could find good working spaces, build a community around them and also add more spaces to the library.

Briefing

The problem that I tried to solve with the creation of this product was a service or a product that could allow people to search for a place from where to get things done and be productive without having to rely on the environment of their homes or their offices, as sometimes those spaces don't fulfill their needs.

Process

Nomadik has been something that I've been working on my free time since October of 2018, where I started collecting information from some fellow remote workers and started defining what are the things that were lacking from their existing platforms and understanding how could we build something that was community driven but that could help both their users as well as the business advertised on it.

In order to maximise the resources and the impact of my work and work in an efficient way towards that goal, I applied the user-centric design process where I gathered feedback and requirements at an initial stage, I conduct research on the topics that related to the pain points that I was trying to solve and break them down to come up with proofs of concept and a whole prototype that could be build in a very MVP way to test out if the process was gonna work.

Having all the flexibility that my full-time job allowed me and no constrains when it comes to stakeholders or time, I tried to approach this in a flexible way that would allow me to get deeper into the real needs and go back and forth as many times as needed as the implementation would be the part that needed to be as meaningful and precise as possible to maximise the results as I don't have a dedicated team of developers helping me implement it.

• Understand the user needs: Given that the product was gonna solve an issue that was highlighted by many of my colleagues and friends over the years and it's something I was actively involved on, I decided to collect all initial feedback in an open survey run out to a few communities of remote workers and friends that I knew were actively working outside of their office and stored all the information as I could on different formats, either Google Drive via the interviews as well as Airtable and Typeform where I created the forms and the feedback database.
• Specify user requirements: From all the feedback gathered and a very high level analysis of the approach we wanted to take, as the idea was to escalate Nomadik to something that could grow as a business in the feature, we broke down the feedback into user needs and stories that needed to be fulfilled while using the platform.
• Design solutions: Here's where the fun part started! I came up with a rough set of wireframes that I tested towards some of the people that gave me initial feedback when doing research and once validated I started developing the final prototypes both for Android and iOS.
• Evaluate against requirements: Once signing off the designs, I put the prototypes in front of a wider group of users willing to test it and I analysed their behaviour and expectations with the product, and with that I've been iterating trying to improve the flow and product in a way that it's easily implementable and at the same time fulfils as many needs from the users as possible.

Research

The research was done using multiple resources and medium where it was stored and mapped out to gather all the feedback, some of the work was initially done and structured on Miro where all the stakeholders and members of the team were working at the same time to assess the data, and the rest was stored on Typeform, Google Forms and Airtable.

Wireframes