After a year on the UX Team, I was asked to lead a team of one Designer, two Researchers, and an Information Architect with the stated goal of “making the member experience visible.” We were asked to capture and document the entire WeWork member journey, from first hearing about WeWork, through joining, and even through departure and “graduation.”
In order to kick off our work as a team, I organized a multi-day offsite where we could hash out the shared understanding that we’d developed as a group since starting at WeWork. We worked through it first on whiteboards, focusing specifically on concrete user actions and key inflection points in the journey, and then we zoomed in which parts we knew the least about.
We knew quite a bit about the Pre-Membership experience, as well as a good deal about the Member experience, but we knew a lot less about Onboarding and also on what we termed “Growth,” which included when a company grew into a new office, either at WeWork or elsewhere. Before embarking on the next step, we captured all of our work using Mural, with plans to return to it in the future.
After consulting with our stakeholders and other experts, we decided to devote our initial sprints to better understanding the Growth portion of the member journey. We knew that if we could create a journey map that communicated the key actions, decisions, emotions, and motivations of our members as they grow their businesses, we could probably come up with some solid opportunities as well to help them stay with WeWork.
First, our researchers worked with community team members in New York, London, and Beijing to identify members who had either recently upgraded their office size within WeWork or had given notice in order to move into their own space. The whole team then conducted 30min interviews with these members, in-person when possible, to tease out the circumstances of the change, the rationale behind either staying with or leaving the company, and any other additional insights that we could glean.
Once we’d completed the interviews, we set about synthesizing our findings, and very quickly came to some great insights. We found consistent “triggers” that led to growth, and we identified critical “blockers” that blocked members from growing within WeWork. We took these findings and worked to represent them visually, so they were more shareable and digestible than a long wiki page. After a number of iterations, we created a printable, well-received journey map.
In a way, the Journey Mapping team was ahead of its time at WeWork, much like Polaris. In just three months we had produced an end-to-end “low fi” map of the member experience, conducted dozens of interviews, and produced a much higher-fidelity segment for the Growth portion of the map. However, due to a reorganization of the product design team under a new leader, the WeWork UX team was disbanded.
Despite the relatively short period of time we existed, the work that we created was used by a number of departments at WeWork. The Community team leveraged it for onboarding of new employees, other Technology teams used portions of it to help visualize the communication touchpoints with members, and most importantly the Sales team used our Growth work to identify opportunities to reduce churn among our member companies. I also came to a much deeper appreciation of the incredible complexity hidden behind the most elegant journey maps, and I’ve been obsessed with them ever since.