For the first seven years of its existence, WeWork relied on an open / unsecured wifi network called simply “Guest.” At some point our legal team asked to institute a more secure (and modern) option through a “Captive Portal,” like the ones found in airports and hotels. While the Legal team simply wanted a safer way to allow people to connect to our wireless network, I saw an opportunity to tell guests about WeWork and to increase our new customer leads by allowing them to opt into communications from the company.
In order to tackle this project, I first had to understand how Captive Portals worked. I dove into the technical requirements of the project, partnering with our in-house IT team to evaluate a few different vendors and understand which might best serve our needs. I found that there are a range of different solutions on the market, some of which required the installation of additional hardware (which would have been a high additional cost), while others had very limited options regarding the customization of the interface.
Eventually, the research paid off and we found a provider who allowed for “virtual” installation on our WiFi networks, a lot of design customization, and could offer us a free trial in order to validate some of the ideas that I had for the design. I mocked up an initial flow and worked with our prototyper and the provider to set it up in two representative buildings, ensuring that we’d be able to capture relevant and statistically significant data to prove the idea and (hopefully) justify a global roll-out.
For the mockups, I wanted to be fully transparent with users, and so I made sure that the user had to opt into marketing, rather than using the Dark UX pattern of defaulting to opted in. I also wanted to see if people who were waiting for meetings might be open to an “Instant Tour,” with the knowledge that being present in a WeWork location was ultimately the most convincing sales tool we had.
The test went extremely well, although we heard anecdotally that there was confusion about whether it was mandatory for guests to take a tour in order to get on the wifi network. It was a great lesson that even when something seems obvious during the design phase, it can be less intuitive in practice. Even removing the invalid numbers from “Instant Tours,” we found that 21% of all guest wifi users chose to opt into marketing emails; I worked with our Data team and found that if we extrapolated this percentage across all of our global visitors, we would gain nearly 170,000 new leads per year, at a cost of less than $1 per lead.
Armed with these results, I created presentations and one-pagers that could easily be shared, and was able to convince our Sales team that the investment was worthwhile. I helped to oversee a global roll-out, and since launch Gated Wifi has become the most prolific source of new leads in the company, generating $2.1MM in incremental revenue. It also became a platform for sharing news articles, testing offers, and capturing further info on the purpose of the guest’s visit.