We Built an App for That

One day a few years ago, I was in the breakroom at one of LinkedIn's multi-floor buildings in Sunnyvale when I ran into someone I had been trying to schedule time with for weeks. I asked her if she was available now, and she said yes.   

We talked as we walked looking for a conference room, but not surprisingly there were none. Finally, she pulled her laptop open, logged in, started outlook, searched for the building we were in, and found us a room on a different floor. "If only there was an app for that she mused."

I thought to myself "yeah… why isn't there an app?"

Fast forward a few months later the Workplace Technology & Data team was faced with a wayfinding problem. As the company moved away from static to digital wayfinding, we explored the possibility of dynamic and interactive maps. But we quickly discovered the update process to those maps were cumbersome and expensive. We began to think through the possibility of an app.  

We started to list all the features we might pursue and began the process of interviewing our employee base to understand what our employees needed. Wayfinding was a definite contender but not at the global scale we thought. Through these interviews a clear problem emerged… open conference rooms were hard to find, and our employees needed a way to book on the fly.  I immediately reflected back and remembered the hassle of pulling out a laptop just to find a room.

Now excited, we developed a roadmap of features predicated on user interviews and moved quickly to the task of building. In November of 2018 we launched our minimum viable product (MVP), the conference room booking tool. It was a success, but we quickly started working on the next features.  

Last quarter we launched a feature that allows employees to quickly file trouble tickets with minimal friction. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), we created a feature that we internally dubbed "inTouch" which in most cases allows people to interact with the app to report a problem in less than 60 seconds. 

Last week we released our newest and possibly most impressive feature.  Directory allows employees to search for employee contact information as featured in our internal directory. As you type an employee's name, the tool searches in real time displaying results while you go. You can quickly find attendees for your next meeting as well as building conference room information. Maps for those buildings are also available, as well as workplace contacts, building addresses and main lobby phone numbers.

New features are already being developed and our next releases will include transportation, café wait times, an approval tool and much more. 

 What features have you seen in similar apps that you can't live without?