Nookdesk came to us with a clear request: an app for booking desks. It would have been easy to start drawing screens that afternoon. Instead we spent two weeks asking members how they actually decided where to sit.
Twenty-two interviews, a week behind the front desk, and one very long spreadsheet of Monday-morning bookings later, the brief looked different. Nobody wanted to book a desk. They wanted to know, on the way in, where they could sit today and who else would be there.
What the interviews changed
The first version we had imagined had a calendar at its centre. The one we built has a live floor plan, and booking takes two taps from it. The calendar is still there, one screen down, for the few people who plan a week ahead.
People told us they hated booking. What they hated was arriving to find their usual desk gone.
Jonas Albrecht, researcher
Research does not always move a project this far. But two weeks of listening cost less than a single sprint spent building the wrong home screen, and no-shows at Nookdesk fell by a third in the first quarter after launch.
Leave a Reply