Designing and Developing Sococo's Virtual Office Tool From the Ground Up
The client
Sococo gives remote and hybrid teams an immersive virtual workspace. It borrows the best of collaboration tools, video conferencing and resource management integrations so people can find each other and find content, run better meetings, and bump into one another the way they would in an office.
Its creators paired up with Netguru while the product was still a concept.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
Initial workshops and research produced five themes to design against: the virtual office itself, rich presence, discovery of people and content, meeting dynamics, and enterprise administration.
Challenge 01Separation from office life
The highest-impact problems came down to the absence of in-person contact, and to online interaction feeling planned and artificial where real life is neither.
Challenge 02Culture and trust at a distance
Medium-impact problems covered work-life balance, moving organisational culture online, and managers not trusting people they cannot see.
Challenge 03Visibility and best practice
Lower down sat disjointed teams, employees losing influence — or the sense of it — by working remotely, and no agreed way of doing remote work well.
What we did
An office that scales from a small team to five thousand people
Desk research and user interviews surfaced the problems worth solving; rooms and floors were then designed to suit companies of very different sizes.
Meetings without scheduling one
A meetings feature supports spontaneous interaction, alongside voice and video calling, screen sharing, and a way for participants to engage with whoever is speaking.
Finding people and what they know
A company directory lets people discover and connect with colleagues across departments, and a messaging screen carries both internal and external conversation.
Everything in one view
A calendar aggregates meetings from external video conferencing platforms and third-party calendars, so the virtual office is not one more place to check.
Room for the unplanned
Features supporting work-life balance, plus spaces and attractions where people can get to know each other in a less formal register.
More like thisOther places we scaled product teams for growth.
What’s next