Background
Managed by Q is a platform designed to help workplace teams run their offices more efficiently. We powered companies like Atlassian, Slack, Zipcar and Allstate. Our main customers are office managers, who are critical to a workplace’s effectiveness. However, they didn’t have a platform designed specifically for their needs.
During my time at Managed by Q, we expanded our company to include a subscription-based business model by creating tools to empower our office managers to run their offices more smoothly.
As we transitioned to becoming a SaaS product, we knew that delivering great mobile experiences would be essential. I was the lead designer of the mobile team and worked with a product manager and several engineers to successfully launch our app.
Research
When we started doing research for the app we wanted to understand what our customers would value the most in a mobile experience. We decided to talk to two of our main user types:
Office managers: Their goal is to create a great workplace experience by maintaining the physical appearance and functionality of an office.
Office vendors: Q has a curated network of vendors that offer office services through the platform.
A common theme emerged early in our research: our customers were often not at their desks throughout the day. However the vast majority of their interactions with Q was done through their computers.
In addition, we noticed that staying on top of communication was essential. Whether it be office managers contacting vendors about work, managers responding to employee requests, or vendors getting back to clients with quotes, communication was frequent and necessary. This information helped us narrow down our work to two main feature sets: marketplace messaging and an employee help desk.
Marketplace Messaging
I designed a simple messaging interface that empowered our clients and vendors to not only communicate through text, but also to share documents, images, and quotes. By making this capability easily accessible to our users on mobile devices, we helped our customers keep their spaces running smoothly. Without easy access to Q’s messaging services on-the-go, responses were often delayed or slipped through the cracks.
Sharing Photos
The prospect of being able to share photos more easily was one of the things our customers looked forward to the most. When our clients uploaded photos to describe their issues, they often saved time and costly site visits for both themselves and their vendors. Without an easy way to share photos, our users were forced to either deal with inefficient workarounds, or avoid sharing photos altogether.
Employee Helpdesk
While marketplace messaging allowed office managers to communicate with vendors outside the office, our employee helpdesk would allow them to collect, organize, and complete internal employee requests.
I chose to display the requests in a kanban view as it tested well with our users and they were already familiar with the feature from our desktop design. In addition, we noticed that filtering was important to our users, especially for those in large organizations, who could have as many as 200 tickets on their board.
Responding to Tickets
On the website, a user could perform up to 20 actions on a ticket, but we wanted to simplify that for mobile, so we reduced the number of possible actions to 7. I designed the feature so that the status of a ticket could be easily changed - with just one tap.
Communication was just as crucial here as in marketplace messaging, and I felt that consistency empowered our users. With this in mind, I reused elements from marketplace messaging for commenting on tickets and also for employees to write internal messages.
App Launch
Over the course of six months we built these features and released our first version of the app. Since then, we received a lot of positive feedback from our users. App usage increased every month as more customers started using the app. One of the main indicators we looked at was messages sent through the app:
| Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.7% | 7.4% | 8.3% | 8.4% | 18.8% | 24.8% |
Messaging Followups
Over the next couple of months we continued to receive feedback and make improvements to the app. As messaging proved to be the main feature people were using in the app, we set out to expand the functionality of messaging and add a few enhancements.
Project and messaging search
Calling clients and vendors
Office directions
Additional App Features
Our mobile team is proud to have created a foundation which has allowed other teams in the company to contribute to the app and add even more features including a vendor directory and an inventory management system. We believe our work has set us up to become the all in one tool for office managers.
