Portfolio
Case study · Deskbird · 2021-2025

A NEW DESK
BOOKING EXPERIENCE

Tools I used
Figma
Figma
Figjam
Figjam
Notion
Notion
Mixpanel
Mixpanel
ProductBoard
ProductBoard
ClickUp
ClickUp
Google Meet
Google Meet
Deskbird Book a space, floor plan view
Role
Lead Product Designer · End-to-end UX, UI, design system & research
Timeline
2021 → 2025 · multiple release cycles
Team
PM, engineering, customer success · cross-functional
01 · The problem

What was
the problem?

  • No global overview of the office
  • Disconnected booking experience
  • Complex navigation and unclear visual hierarchy
  • Booking felt disconnected from space
  • Card-based layout that created visual clutter
  • Difficulty understanding where colleagues were sitting
  • Lack of spatial context
Old Deskbird Book a space, card-based admin layout
02 · Research

Sources of insights

Weekly customer calls
User interviews and surveys
ProductBoard feedback
Usage data and drop-offs (Mixpanel)
Support tickets and internal feedback
03 · Before visual polish

Before visual polish,
we focused on:

  • User profiles and use cases
  • Team brainstorming sessions
  • Competitive and pattern research
  • Rapid layout experiments
Figjam ♥
Nishita Dhawan, user persona and ideas bucket
04 · Exploration

130+ screens in Figma

Exploring multiple flows, edge cases, and user scenarios.

05 · Validation

Test.
Learn.
Iterate.

  • Live prototype tests with real customers
  • Internal testing across teams
  • On-demand UI validation tools (lyssna.com)
Search interaction prototype
06 · Foundation

A shared design system

Tokens, components, and patterns shipped together with the new booking experience, so every team builds from the same source of truth.

Deskbird design system, components and patterns
07 · Final product

The new Book a space

Final Book a space, floor plan + bookings panel
Filters and office functions
Desk detail popover
08 · Outcome

From a cluttered admin into a spatial product people actually want to use.

130+
Figma screens explored
7
Tools in the workflow
5
Sources of validated insight
1
Shared design system shipped
What actually changed after launch

The numbers above are about how the work was done. These are about what happened once the new booking system shipped, the signals that came back from users and from the customer success team in the months after.

Onboarding stopped needing a human

Before the redesign, every new client needed a hands-on walkthrough from customer success. The platform wasn't intuitive enough to figure out on its own. After launch that changed almost completely, new customers picked the product up the way people pick up a well-designed consumer app, without anyone sitting next to them to explain it.

The clearest signal came from the customer success team, the onboarding calls they used to run stopped being necessary.

The office got its spatial sense back

For years, the loudest recurring complaint was that people had no spatial sense of the office. They couldn't see where colleagues were sitting, couldn't find the office manager, the first aid station, or the person responsible for a given area. After the floor-plan-first experience launched, those complaints disappeared. Not because the interface got prettier, but because the spatial context that had been missing entirely was finally there.

Users also reported that booking itself felt faster and required fewer clicks, which was the expected outcome of the new flow.

Booking a desk stopped feeling like filing a request and started feeling like picking a seat, which is what it always should have been.