Kowork: Connecting People in Similar Industries
Designer
2021
Kowork is a personal design project that I ideated in 2021. The vision behind Kowork is simple: to connect people, specifically those in remote work environments, with others in similar industries and fields in a fun and genuine way.
Why
What's the purpose of Kowork?
The new age of remote working provides so many benefits, such as cost savings, flexibility, more freedom, and a even lower carbon footprint! However, it can be hard to meet new people for (1) young professionals to socialize or network, and (2) students to find friends or form study groups. Physical offices, classrooms, and university common lounges were traditionally used as a common medium to facilitate this type of human interaction; however, with the rise of post-Covid remote culture, some of these spaces (particularly offices) are slowly disappearing.
How do we meet new people then? There are platforms out there, such as Bumble Friends/Business, but it takes the genuineness out of meeting new people through swiping and creating idealized online versions of ourselves. For example, “71% think that people lying to appear more desirable is a very common occurrence” (Pew Research Center).
This is where I hope Kowork can provide a solution.
Target Audience
Who is Kowork for?
The ideal target audience is young professionals and university students. I wanted the design of the app to not feel too serious and professional (like LinkedIn) but rather more social and fun.
Wireframing
I generally like to research designs to inspired first and then translate my ideas into low-fidelity wireframes to get a sense of the general layout of my designs. In these wireframes, I'm envisioning what the different base flows and screens could be structured as.
Iteration 01
Building the signup / login flow
Building upon the wireframes for the signup / login flows, I considered what the user journey should be and what basic information the app needs from the user to get onboarded quickly.
Iteration 02
Iterating over the signup / login flow
I iterated on this flow more by cleaning up the fun visuals (created in Blender) and the colors of the app's theme to improve readability and visual accessibility.
Iteration 03
Fleshing out the main screens
I then fleshed out more of the main screens from the initial wireframes, in which users can message friends and see, join, and explore active sessions.
Iteration 04
Managing Kowork sessions
But what do these sessions look like? Clicking on a session to join it opens a new screen with important details, such as where it's located, who created the session, what it's for, and the list of attendees.
Moreover, the session owner has expanded capabilities to edit the aforementioned details and terminate the session.
Final Results & Impact
At a high level, I created an app design from scratch to solve a real world issue that many working professionals and students are experiencing. Since this was just a fun side project, I wasn't able to dedicate too much time to it nor was I able to capture any real-life metrics.
However, if this were to be developed in code and launched, I'd like to iterate further with the designs, collect user metrics / behaviors, and conduct testing to validate the designs.
