CapitaStar@Work

The workplace experience app for CapitaLand’s tenants - winner at the 2023 SBR Technology Excellence Awards.

Sector: Commercial real estate
Role: UX/UI Lead
Scope: UX/UI, research, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, design system, admin portal
Tools: Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Keynote
Year: 2023

CapitaStar@Work marketing artwork announcing the award-winning workspace experience app

The problem

CapitaStar@Work is the platform tenants use to get through their working day in a CapitaLand property - booking space, inviting visitors, getting through the door, claiming deals. It serves everyone from a two-person studio in a co-working floor to an enterprise tenant with its own security requirements.

By 2023 the platform worked, but the joins showed. Sign-up was difficult enough that people gave up and waited on the servicing team. Meeting rooms were hard to book. The visitor invitation journey did not cover the case of someone arriving outside office hours. Administrators could not download the information they needed, so they re-keyed it by hand. Event booking sat apart from everything else. And a good number of visitors simply did not understand what to do with the QR code they had been sent.

Objectives

Six of them, agreed before anything was drawn:

Integrate properly with the CapitaStar sister app, so the two read as one family.
Strengthen the deals feature and the redemption flow behind it.
Make space booking something a tenant would do unaided.
Rebuild onboarding for tenants, visitors and the public.
Redesign the home screen around what people actually came to do.
Give administrators a portal that answered their questions without a phone call.

What I did

I was the UX/UI Lead, running a small team of designers and researchers across the whole project lifecycle - concept, wireframing, prototyping and final design.

That included the parts of the job that are not drawing: running the stakeholder interviews that surfaced the list above, taking the technical constraints back from the engineers and resolving them in the design rather than escalating them, and reviewing my designers’ work against a standard we had agreed.

Survey results: 77% wanted regular building updates, 63% wanted an online onboarding guide, 38% wanted to order from onsite retailers — Three numbers did most of the arguing for us. The first two we expected. The third - ordering from the retailers downstairs - was the one nobody had asked for and everybody wanted.

Research

Extensive international and market-competitive research set the goals. The persona set was deliberately wide, because the product genuinely serves all of it: small businesses, established enterprises with heightened security and workspace control requirements, short and long lease durations, employees and visitors, and the administrators and building managers on the other side of the glass.

Stakeholder interviews then turned a general sense that things could be better into a specific, ordered list of failures - which is what made the scope arguable rather than a matter of taste.

User onboarding flow diagram covering tenant, self-declared tenant, public and ad-hoc entry paths — The onboarding flow, drawn for every entry point at once. Tenants, self-declared tenants, public users and the ad-hoc path all had to arrive at the same home screen - and drawing them together was what exposed how many of them didn’t.

Design process

User flows came first, built from the personas and the available features, then wireframes refined against engineering input and the interview findings, then prototypes.

Onboarding screens: animated splash with mobile number entry, and building affiliation confirmation — Sign-up was where we lost people. Cutting the form down, auto-populating it from the core system and confirming affiliation in a single step turned the longest journey in the product into one of the shortest.

Redesigned home screen with weekly activity widget, and the My Activities visitor list — The activity widget was the argument I most wanted to win: bookings, invitations and registrations in the first screenful, rather than four separate places to go looking.

Space booking screens: a hot desk listing, the filter panel, and the room browse view — Booking a room used to be the reason people rang the servicing team. Filters consolidated onto one page, the credit balance kept visible in the header, and wayfinding to the room once it is yours.

Deals screens showing the retail offer list and a voucher redemption page — Deals had to read as one wallet shared with the CapitaStar app, not as a second loyalty scheme that happened to live in the same building.

Design system

Underneath all of it sat a design system covering colour, typography, icons, components, grid, accessibility and documentation. On a product with this many surfaces and this many personas, it is the only thing that keeps consistency from becoming a review problem.

Home screen card specifications for deals, events and trending content, with fixed pixel sizes — The card sizes are the least interesting page in the system and the reason the rest of it holds. Once they were fixed, every new kind of content already had somewhere to live.

Outcome

CapitaStar@Work won its category at the 2023 SBR Technology Excellence Awards.

The measures the project was held to were commercial as much as experiential: sales revenue, secure access, simpler administration, integration with the CapitaStar ecosystem, and a foundation that could scale as the portfolio grew.

A set of CapitaStar@Work application screens

Liliya’s team receiving the SBR Technology Excellence Award in 2023 — The 2023 SBR Technology Excellence Awards.