Croissant

Croissant is a popular app for finding and booking co-working spaces on-demand in NYC, SF, LA, and Boston.  The founders started the company in 2015 and named it Croissant because they'd spend hours working out of coffee shops and would buy croissants for staying so long. Croissant offers users 3 different subscription plans, the most popular being "The Creator", 40 hours of co-working + 4 guest hours at any spaces listed, for $129/month.

 

PROJECT SCOPE

Croissant's customers love the flexibility of booking spaces on-demand, but they also expressed interest in being able to reserve spaces ahead of time too, especially for small teams and important meetings, so the project scope centered on designing a Book Ahead feature allowing users to reserve spaces in advance and add guests.  

 

BEFORE

Users could not book spaces in advance, and they could only "Hold a Seat" for up to 1 hour.  They tap the "Check In Now" button and show the front desk manager to start their session, and they tap "Check-Out" when they leave the space to stop the hourly billing for their session.

 

 
 

AFTER

Users are able to book spaces ahead of time for themselves and for their guests and sync their reservations with their calendars.  Customers can now also filters spaces by attributes that are important to them, like amenities and hours, as well as save their favorites. 

 
 

Understanding the Space

RESEARCH

 

Preliminary research included a competitive analysis of Deskpass, Liquidspace, and Breather, other major co-working apps, concluding that Croissant's biggest competitive advantages are its relative affordability and the flexibility of booking spaces on-demand.  

 
 

In order to understand people's expectations and experiences around reserving spaces in advance, we conducted brief usability tests on a competitor book ahead flow:

  • Flexible cancellation policy- most people considered 48 hour notice sufficient to cancel without penalty
  • Most users prefer to only specify Start time when they book a reservation, and to be able to check-out on demand similar to Croissant's current check-out flow, rather than specifying End Time in advance
  • Would like to be able to add reservations easily to their personal calendars
 
 

Exploring Booking Flows

ITERATIONS

Below are different lo-fidelity variations of book ahead flows based on our research and initial product ideas.  Major feature changes included are:

  • Book Ahead - Ability to book spaces ahead of time 
  • Favorites- Ability to "favorite" certain spaces
  • Filters- Ability to filter spaces not just by location, but also by amenities and opening hours
 
 
 
 
 
 

Visual Elements

STYLE

I helped make a style guide and sourced and created custom icons for the navbar and amenities, shown below.

 
 
 

 

This design was implemented in a release in late 2016.  Since then Croissant has expanded rapidly from serving 3 cities to over 11, including international locations, and expanded its offerings to include new services like conference reservations.