As a Product Designer I was responsible for the art direction, research, sketching, prototyping, UI design, motion design and branding.



Hot-Desking - noun
“The practice in an office of allocating desks to workers when they are required or on a rota system, rather than giving each worker their own desk.”

Batuta is a desktop and mobile app that facilitates companies to manage their hot-desking environment. Hot-desking without proper management can cause a frustrating experience to employees resulting in lack of communication, poor visibility on projects outside their own team and a loss in social interaction.

Two thirds of UK companies have at least one area in the company that operates under a hot-desking scheme. Hot-desking stimulates social interaction which is part of a healthy working environment.

How might we improve the hot-desking experience of a group of workers in a high pace environment?

It is common to see these days companies and co-working spaces adopting hot-desking practices to maximise flexibility and decrease costs. Sounds very practical isn’t it?

Well, what if you don’t know where you’ll seat tomorrow as you don’t have your own desk? What if as soon as you arrive at work you find out that all those desks in that floor you wanted to work have been taken? What if the colleagues you are working with  today and siting next to you move somewhere else tomorrow so you end up not knowing where they are?

Individuals can join a desk on the way to work or a day before if they prefer, Batuta also helps you find where someone is sitting and communicate with ease. If you are a project manager managing an Agile team you can allocate you team into desks and let me know where they will be working. If you are a Co-working manager you can have a full overview at the occupancy of your space and easily manage new hot-dusking bookings.

With Batuta you can plan ahead and do much more at work by not having to worry about trivial things like “Where Am I siting today?” while working on a hot-desking environment.

I started by creating a mindmap of possible journeys which then evolved to individual high level user flows based on personas' pain points.

Interviews were conducted with hot-desking workers at their own environment to understand concerns and how they feel. The session helped to create user personas templates which gave me great insights based on users’ feedback.

I started working on high level user journeys of how a typical day of a hot-desking worker looks like highlighting what they like and their pain points.

To test my concept, I quickly created wireframe prototypes that demonstrate key user flows and tested with a small group of people. 

Post testing, I conducted a brainstorm sessions with the team to validate the concept, clarity and user efficiency.

Based on user stories I started designing high fidelity prototypes by creating a component based design system for the user interface. I used Sketch for UI design and After Effects for motion design on micro-interactions. 

Using a variation of Material Design style I have put together some sleek designs for web and mobile. The UI needed to be as simple and as intuitive as possible as people would mainly sign in into the app and perform quick tasks like as joining a desk, setting their status, messaging someone or try to find where someone is siting. 

While creating and editing the team's desks we have a clear overview of the desk's location with a photo of it for easy identification, actual location on map, the dates which the desk will be available and who is siting where. 

Users can quickly set their status and find the status of other people too, making it easy to reach out to them.

Easily organise workspaces and get a summary of their details.  Duplicate, delete and share with work colleagues so they can join desks when ready. 

Chat functionality build in the app so users don’t need to use alternative apps to keep the communication going.

Admin users can have a full overview of their organisations and workspace via a modular dashboard, keeping control at all time over people’s activities.

I was in charge of the Art Direction and designed multiple concepts until the brand direction resonated with the meaning. Batuta means “baton” which is the tool that the Maestro uses to conduct the orchestra which empowers the maestro to coordinate musicians and have total control over his orchestra. The green drop is the bottom of the baton. It is used mainly isolated as it is an iconic and easily identifiable icon. I wanted to create a recognisable logo based on form and colour. I used Illustrator and Photoshop to create the visuals.