Back to works

NTT DATA
Sobos welcomes you (back) to the office

Booking your desk. Made easy.

Team
NTT DATA
Tangity
Services
UX and Service Design
Visual Design
Front-end Development
Content Design
Studios
Milan
Duration
21 months

Challenge

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, most businesses could no longer accommodate their entire staff at the workplace. To solve this problem, we set out to develop a flexibility-based smart office work approach to intelligently help manage office spaces. This design innovation came with its own set of challenges. Not only did we want to create a white-label solution that would guarantee that fast-changing health and safety regulations are respected, but one that supports employees in planning their day at the office. All while creating a clear design system that could easily adapt to fit our clients’ needs. All of that in as little time as possible. 

Sobos mobile and tablet app

Approach

Since we were in the lucky position of being both the designers and part of the end-users, we quickly applied our Service Design vision, defined our guiding principles —Relevant, Usable, Suitable, Manageable — and described User Journeys to identify our users’ needs. The most important: being able to return to the office to work and socialize in a safe environment.

Our multidisciplinary team of strategic consultants, composed of UX, Service, Visual and Content Designers, Project Managers, and Developers, enabled us to sprint from context analysis to design and development in fluid and iterative waves. Due to the quickly approaching release date, we designed the app following an evolutive approach, in which we defined new features for upcoming releases. We released the first version of Sobos in just one month.

Here are some of our process highlights:

  • Remote but united: the entire project was carried out remotely while connecting different business lines and united various cities of NTT DATA Italy.
  • Agile: as time was scarce, UX Design, UI Design, and Mobile Development worked in parallel and with constant progress each week.
  • Modular: to stay flexible, we created a modular Design System that could easily be adapted and evolved in each project phase.
Several screens of SoBoS mobile and tablet app.

Insight

By putting our own employee's needs first, we could quickly pinpoint Sobos' main features. To create a scalable solution, we needed to rethink and evaluate when employees access the office building and their duration of stay as we could use this data and turn it into analysis and protection tools for all those involved.

Sobos map

Solution

As a result, we created a white-label desktop and mobile app, which allows employees of any company to book their desks or stop-overs intuitively in just a few steps from the comfort of their homes. All while providing Facility Management and Health & Safety teams with visibility over available spots at all times. Our modular Design System facilitates the customization of the user experience and user interface  to easily adapt to other companies visual brand identities. The new design system has also created the basis for other internal NTT DATA solutions, such as Manny, our company’s internal performance review tool.

Sobos offices availability in app
While Sobos has made booking a desk child’s play, it was also essential to efficiently manage all our offices’ capacities and manage the presence of our employees with the utmost attention to Health and Safety issues.
- Filippo Locatelli, quoteSource

Adoption

4,000

users since launch

Bookable desks

800

in 8 cities

Average bookings

132

daily

Average check-ins

90

daily