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When: 2017- 2020
Roles: UX, UI, Lead Product Design
Channels: Web, Mobile, Physical
Client Project
Neyborly is a venture-backed startup that provides affordable gathering space that anyone can rent by the hour, day, or month. It's a technology-enabled real estate company trying to find a solution to the rampant vacancy of ground-floor commercial space.
I was the 3rd employee and was there for a little more than two years. I moved from Designer to Head of Design and was tasked with everything from leading the UX on our new web platform to creating and fostering a recognizable brand.
I was in charge of our small but potent creative team while at Neyborly. I led our design, both digital and physical, and was directly responsible for designing and prototyping nearly every page and feature on the new Neyborly site.
At the beginning of 2019 the Neyborly website was holding the company back. Neyborly had a high-touch, inquiry-based booking process, the site wasn't responsive, there was no fast way to understand what was offered at venues, and no clear messaging or brand experience.
Our challenge was to replace as many of these features as possible with a more user centric experience that would both drive revenue, reduce internal workloads, and provide a solid base for the brand to grow.
Our old site presented the user with unorganized information with minimal context - You can't even see a calendar of available dates.
Yikes!
When we set off to remake Neyborly.com we had the one thing dev teams around the world crave: hundreds and hundreds of guests and customers willing and happy to give feedback.
Leaning on this - we kicked-off the site remake with a summer long discovery with some of our top guests.
Through a series of in-person interviews and surveys, our Design and Customer Experience teams were able to understand both the user journey and pain points our old site created.
We used these cycles of question and answer throughout the initial phases of production to discover how best to develop a user friendly site for booking venues.
Pre-Booking:
Guest learns the date of event. They begin to gather headcount, event details, and clarify the city or region in which the event will take place.
Pre-Booking:
Guest searches for available venues in the city that will fit their estimated headcount. They do this through a Google search, searching platforms like Peerspace or Splacer, and through word of mouth.
Pre-Booking:
Guests finds a venue and either reserves or puts a hold on the day and time they need for their event. At this time, they either plan to tour or are actively touring the space.
Post-Booking, Pre-Event:
If they haven't already, our guests find a way to see the inside of the venue and begin to plan their event. This is most often through an in-person tour and rarely through a digital walk-through (slideshow, video, google maps, etc...). They take photos or videos to share with other hosts or attendees.
Post-Booking, Pre-Event:
Guests begin inviting other attendees to the event now that the date and time are firmly established.
Post-Booking, Pre-Event:
Guests secure catering, additional furniture, and any other event amenities they might need. These range from post-its to photo booths.
Day-of-Event:
Guests come early to prepare for their event. They bring help to set-up immediately before their event begins. Their amenities arrive and are set-up, either by the vendor or by the guests themselves.
The event concludes and the guests clean-up and take down their set-up.
Post-Event:
Either on the same day or shortly after, all amenities and additional event accessories are picked up by the vendor or the guests themselves.
Post-Event:
The guest sends thank you's or other follow-up materials to their attendees. They often save an event venue for later if they have had a positive experience.
With the discovery of the needs and wants of our typical user, we can now start to create our goals and deliverables.
Internally - the new web platform had to increase total conversions (booking hours at a venue) at Neyborly spaces in every market.
From the user's perspective - we needed an experience that continually educated our guests, allows them to book on demand, and builds trust along their multi-stage journey.
When it was all said and done, the team decided to focus on the calendar, booking funnel, and new venue pages. These 3 main points in the user experience defined many of the points of pain and points of success in our typical users journey.
This research and goal setting allowed us to hone in on our first prototypes and stress-tests.
And we're off! At this point I was a lead in a team of seven and was still the only UX / UI member. Before it was all said and done we had a product team of ten and I was the head of a four person creative team. We worked on each feature and page using the agile-dev cycle making sure to include our CEO, CTO, and Head of Customer Experience at every point.
To design and prototype this site I always start with a combination of drawing, Sketch, Illustrator, and index cards.
early splash UX & wires
From payment processing to Google Maps integrations we ended up designing dozens of user flows across about one hundred different wireframes. Each lower fidelity concept that had something good was brought up to a high(er) fidelity mockup to show to leadership and investors. We ended up with an impressive array of pages that fit neatly into our user journey and hit as many goals as possible in the time we had allotted.
I used a combination of Figma, inVision, and AdobeXD for hand-off to engineering and leadership.
20+ responsive pages
The site's been live now for just over 50 days ( Nov '19 ) and we're successfully tracking all conversions (which is hovering around 12% for all you data nerds) and have noted a reduced time-to-book from our customer experience team. We'll be tracking these metrics and learning from our work long after I leave.
Some big success points have already show themselves.
1) Neyborly's new site has reduced the workload about ~1 hour every day for each of our customer experience representatives. This is due mainly to the automated booking flow and calendar view being front and center on the venue page.
2) Neyborly has already clocked 2 record breaking revenue days since launch.
My design with Neyborly is nearly as multi-media as you can get. From my recent leadership on the digital product design to my very first sketches of the logo, I loved every bit of it.
If you're looking for my branding work, interior design, or visual identity work at Neyborly - take a look here.
If you'd like to dig deeper into my process, I've built a small instagram where my sketches, ideas, and scratch documents end up for y'all.