Spatial UX Study & Workplace Strategy: Case Study · Self-Initiated Practice Project

Research to Realization: how I read a floor plate when the data doesn't agree with itself.

Note: This is a self-initiated practice project. The company and brief are hypothetical, created to demonstrate how I approach workplace strategy end to end. It's a full case, worked start to finish. First the raw thinking board, then what it adds up to. I've kept in the one call I got wrong, because catching it was the actual work.

The practice brief:

The scenario: a 220-person SaaS company (Series C, scaling fast).
Hybrid policy: 3 days/week expected in-office.
Utilization data: desks at 50% occupancy average; "collab pods" (4-person, informal, no booking needed) at 92% occupancy; formal bookable meeting rooms at 30% occupancy.
Survey: 65% say they come in mainly for spontaneous collaboration with their team, not scheduled meetings; the top complaint is "I can never find a place to just huddle for 10 minutes without booking a room."
Exit interviews (engineers, <1 year tenure, high attrition on this segment specifically): "felt disconnected from my team," "onboarding was mostly async, never really met people."
Business goal (leadership interview): reduce onboarding-driven attrition and improve cross-team collaboration, while headcount is projected to grow 40% in the next year (so the footprint can't just shrink).

I.The Thinking Board

The findings, the contradictions, and the typology calls, in the order I worked through them

Drag to pan · Scroll or +/− to zoom

Research inference, contradictory-data check, work-mode ratio, typology decision, one change-management call, one cost angle, and the zoning gradient.

II.Analysis

What the board above actually adds up to, one pillar at a time

Research & Diagnostics

Collab pods (no booking): 92% occupancy Formal rooms (bookable): 30% occupancy

On their own, these two numbers look like they disagree. Put next to the business goal, they say the same thing: people pick the easy option every time it's there. This isn't a conflict I need to resolve by choosing one number over the other. It's the most useful signal in the whole dataset.

The exit interviews say "I felt disconnected" and "I never really met people." The occupancy numbers say the same thing in a different way, one is what people told us, the other is what they actually did. When both point the same direction, I trust the finding more.

II.

Work-Mode Ratio

The survey gives me one real number: 65% say they come in mainly to collaborate on the spot. Nothing tells me what the other 35% is doing. I could guess a split to make the ratio look complete, but that would just be a made-up number wearing a real one's clothes. So I'm stating the 65%, naming the gap, and asking for one more survey question before I finalize the space program.

III.

Typology Decision

The complaint was specific: people couldn't find space to huddle for ten minutes without booking a room. My first idea was to add a booking and availability screen to the new huddle zone. Once I checked that against the actual complaint, it didn't hold up, adding a screen to check just puts the same friction back in.

What I changed my mind on: the fix isn't a better-managed room. It's a different access rule entirely, a new zone sized for 2 to 4 people, first-come, no booking at all, the same way the existing pods already work at 92% occupancy.

One more thing shapes how far I take this: headcount grows 40% next year, and the footprint doesn't grow with it. So today's "spare" space is partly next year's demand. I'd convert a portion of the underused formal rooms, checked against where occupancy is headed, not all of it, and not based on today's numbers alone.

IV.

Change Management

Moving toward open, unbooked space creates one clear group of people who'll push back: anyone who relies on private, bookable rooms for confidential work. In ADKAR terms, that's a Desire problem, not a knowledge one. They'll understand the change fine. They just won't want it. So the move isn't more explaining, it's letting them help decide which rooms actually convert, and keeping a smaller set of private rooms for real confidential needs.

Cost Angle & Measurement

Footprint is fixed and headcount is going up 40%, so I can't make the cost case by shrinking square footage. The lever is efficiency instead, getting more real use out of the same space counts as a cost win, even without a smaller lease. At six months, the number that actually matters isn't room bookings. It's whether attrition among new hires has gone down, since that's the real goal this was solving for.

VI.

Zoning Logic

I sorted every zone along one line: how loud and how private it needs to be, from highest to lowest. Entrance and café sit at the loud end. Desks and huddle space sit in the middle. Private rooms and senior rooms sit at the quiet end. That one line, more than any label I put on a zone, is what actually decides where things go and what needs a buffer between them.

The Reframe

This was never a space problem. It was a friction problem, and the attrition numbers and the occupancy numbers were saying the same thing in two different ways.

So the practice brief isn't about adding square footage. It's about taking out the steps between a person and a place to connect, and being upfront, right on the diagram, about which parts are backed by data and which are still a guess.

I left the change of mind in on purpose instead of only showing the clean final answer. Proposing a fix, checking it against the evidence, and reversing it when the evidence disagreed, that's the actual skill here, not the finished-looking version of it.

Sanya Vithalkar