User experience first

Nils, the first employee of Upgrade Estate and currently the CCO, oversees sales, marketing, and business development. He plays a crucial role in the commercial, operational, and ICT development of Upoffiz. Stein, a digital expert with a background in the festival sector, joined Upgrade Estate a year and a half ago as CIO. He and his team are specialized in digitally connecting people, systems, and processes, acting as the digital glue within the company.

You are juggling terms; it is sometimes impossible to follow. Can you briefly explain what UUUX stands for?

NILS: UUUX stands for Ultimate Upgrade User Experience or ultimate user experience. It’s a term that means more than digital experience. With every brand, we start from our strategy, customer friendliness or customer intimacy, to give the best possible experience to our users. So we can very easily start applying this to all of our brands.

Thinking about the ultimate user experience arose while developing the Upoffiz concept. We recognized that there are more different users involved on this site than, say, the student and service parties at Upkot. You have tenants, employees of those tenants, AND Upoffiz AND Upliving. You also have the event spaces, a bar that connects everything. That ensures that many parties have to enjoy a smooth and pleasant user experience.

Sounds great, but how do you translate that on campus at Loop5?

STEIN: Through the Campus app, the digital link between the buildings and mobility hUP on the site and the users who access it. This efficient application allows digital processes to work largely in the background so that they remain invisible to the user. This supports ease of use. It would be quite impractical should a large tenant with thousands of employees have to grant access to every employee every day. Our tenants manage their staff’s access as simply as possible, allowing everyone to use the building as frictionlessly as possible.

Was this idea born out of your own need or frustration?

NILS: Before we started the Upoffiz concept, we did intensive market research. Is there a market for offices at this location? Which parties have the greatest need for offices? Once that was clear, we surveyed several companies about the positive and negative experiences within their current office situation. It quickly became clear that these needs were mainly facility-related. From the user’s frustrations, we started to optimize the concept. From that market research and in order to remove defined frictions as much as possible, we started outlining the journey that the customer/user takes as soon as they come into contact with us. This is also called customer journey mapping. On the other hand, we are also hosts and managers of our own sites. With the feedback given, we can optimize the user experience of our own departments.

There are many parties involved and the campus is very large. How do you get started on this?

NILS: When we mapped all the users of the Upoffiz site, we recognized that there are many different categories of users. The customer journey mapping started very basic by putting the floor plan of the whole site on a big table to define all the users of the site by type with all the corresponding actions they perform on our site. That includes the garbage collector, the window cleaner, and the mover, as well as the tenants who come by bike or still choose the car. We included all those scenarios.

From the exercise also came interesting insights that led to better decisions. At one point we drew out the elevators on the floor and saw that they needed to be wider to accommodate all the delivery scenarios. So we widened the elevators. Without drawing out those customer journeys, we wouldn’t have noticed this as quickly or maybe not at all.

Stein, you have a lot of experience in developing difficult software applications. Have you ever done anything like this and how complex is it?

STEIN: The most complex is solving the accesses: our tenants want to be able to give their employees access as smoothly as possible without much administration. That’s what we focused on. Access for guests and one-time visitors also received due attention. This is a very different concept from Upliving and Upkot where access is only required for tenants.

At the start of the project, I already had a big head start. In our Art Deco landmark across from the UFO building, Nils and other employees had done a lot of experimentation before my arrival. It was a kind of test case for the later Upoffiz. I especially have a lot of experience with digital customer experience at scale. With my team, I simplified the setup in that building, scrapped non-scalable components, and chose underlying technologies that are open and connectable. 

The complexity is currently only in integrating terminals and dealing with potential friction at startup by providing a period of hypercare with the team. It turned out to be the right mix of my experience, the lessons from Nils’ experiment, and my team of passionate and very strong profiles. That combination made the complex challenge a lot more manageable.

There are thousands of software packages on the market; is there no single one that meets your needs 100%?

STEIN: Comprehensive packages don’t exist. There are so many variables that one fixed package can never fully cover the load. We chose the best solutions and pushed for the pieces around connectivity that we absolutely wanted in there. On that basic configuration, we started developing further. This is about those 20% that facilitate open connectivity between the different systems and hardware in the building and make us unique. It’s about synchronization of users, managing visitors and externals, and use of parking facilities. The Campus app got there as an end result through a selection of packages in the market that are open and we can let speak to each other.

At Upkot and Upliving, you guys are at the forefront of digitization and automation. Dare you say that you are also unique with the Upoffiz Campus app?

NILS: We stand out with the Campus app by combining a flawless user experience with an application that is not complex. Through the customer mapping exercise, the solution for the user was well prepared and thus became quality customization.

STEIN: In other buildings, many modalities such as building access, parking, guest reception, and so on are programmed separately. We use standard applications that are properly linked together. As a result, we have digitally automated the use of the buildings to suit the users. 

Developing new applications requires energy and you often pay learning fees. What would you approach differently should you start up again?

STEIN: I found the intersection between traditional construction and digital product development very instructive. What we build physically now is for the next 20 years and not for a weekend. In a digital development project, you can start tweaking, testing, and releasing things as you go along. Here you can’t. Once the cabling is drawn in, that’s already in a process. Adjusting something then is very difficult. Those are teachable insights. It’s about balance. Even if you’ve thought well, even if the code for your building is correct, the output still fluctuates. In a digital project, the motto is: code is law. What you code determines the output.

NILS: I wouldn’t change anything about the process. What Stein says just shows the importance of a good customer journey mapping beforehand. What I think happens very often in the market is that that customer journey as a digital layer is not thought about until after the plan is developed. Or even only when the building is there. Then you have to adjust that at the operational level. Intensively researching the market and preparing yourself intensively is crucial.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how exciting was it to see the app working in reality for the first time?

STEIN: In the festival world, I was used to going from 0 to 100 in a day’s time. It was a luxury for me to have all those test moments. That it was going to work we knew in November 2023. The application was ready and virtual testing could start. In March 2024, we rolled out our proof of concept. That was the most exciting moment and actually went smoothly. Currently, my team and I are in a period of hypercare. What we learn now makes us adjust before Loop5 will be used by other tenants. Now the key is to have even less friction.

NILS: For me, it was reassuring to put the digital part in the hands of real professionals. I focus on the user experience of the end users and see a lot of smiling faces. For me, that user experience is the yardstick to judge whether everything works smoothly. When I first saw the barrier open based on my license plate, I thought my user experience was more than successful.