Cowrks

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Cowrks is one of India’s largest providers of managed coworking spaces. Offering a variety of shared office spaces catered to their customer’s needs, the company has a full suite of products that engages their customers with their office space.

DURATION

January 2019 - February 2019

TYPE OF ENGAGEMENT

UI/UX Intern with the Technology Team

MY ROLE

Designing the web and mobile interfaces for a new product offering using the company's new design guidelines. 

WHAT'S

Towards the end of 2018, I was neck-deep within the college application process for HCI programs. However, I had a month or two potentially available for internships after these submissions. 

Having previously interned at a design studio that works on several client projects, I wanted to experience the flavor of working with a design team that works iteratively on their product suite. Cowrks was happy enough to offer me an opportunity to do just this!

The first day at the office was signing documents, socializing and collecting goodies. The usual.

Eventually, I settled into the beautiful workplace that Cowrks has maintained. Not only do the customers enjoy these, but also employees! Working amongst such a vibrant and bustling environment was a joyful experience.

INITIATING

The start of my internship coincided with a change in the visual style of Cowrks’ digital products. While waiting for new projects coming down the pipeline, I was asked to familiarize myself with the technology team and their current ongoing projects. During this time, I noticed that their mobile app had several usability issues. And I couldn't just wait around doing nothing while those existed.

I presented these issues as a Heuristic Evaluation Report to the Product Manager for the Cowrks Connect app.

Over half the people interviewed linked the target words to freedom and independence. Also, 80% of them said that origami reminds them about childhood. This validation of user empathy was taken forward into early sketches and the formulation of the identity.

INTERNSHP PROJECT:

I was required to use the newly developed design style guides to design a responsive website for Converge, a new product offering from Cowrks that lets customers book spaces in Cowrks across cities over India. These spaces could be used for meetings, workshops, events, and even interviews.

Having regular meetings with the PMs and the developers to iterate over ideas was crucial. This collaboration provided a healthy balance between creativity, feasibility and business requirements.

For the mobile and web versions, I had to work collaboratively with another designer to build the screens of the product. You could view the results of those designs (and several iterations that might have occurred after I left) at :

I also worked on developing mockups and interactive prototypes for the mobile version on the Converge website. We had certain guidelines in place for the layout of the application from the developers. Since the new website would be built upon the existing tech stack, there was not a lot of room afforded to over-the-top creativity.

My contributions to the mobile version of the app are shown below:

INITIATING A

Over the course of the internship, I found it tiresome to request Sketch or XD files from several different designers for projects. Hoping to take advantage of the new redesign of their digital design language, I convinced a fellow designer to start working with me towards a shared design library (on Sketch) that could be used across their products in this new visual style.

Working on a template Sketch Library for Android design elements during my last few days in the internship, we presented a demo of the functioning of the library to the team. I hope that the shared library that I have worked on develops into a design system! I would love to visit again and see how it has turned out over the months.

SHOWING

I relocated to Bangalore, India for the duration of the internship. Found a lovely co-living space for the traveling and creative community in Construkt. There used to be a chalkboard with notices and upcoming events within the house. Before I left back for my college, I made sure to liven up that mundane board for once. 

Continuing the trend of improving mundane routines, during my last day at the office, I replaced the regular tea biscuits with Oreos! Hearing back pleasantries from the PMs and the Community Managers was delightful.