When it comes to designing the future of work, Amazing Group has always been at the forefront of empowerment. Since 1992, it has been providing co-working spaces for its team members to work, meet and discuss business issues.

Artificial intelligence will potentially automate up to 47% of Hong Kong jobs over the next two decades. Therefore, it is more important than ever that Amazing Group facilitates and enables its teams to reach their full potential. With its recent office expansion and increasing technical literacy of team members, Amazing Group recognizes the need to adjust its strategy for attracting and retaining talent.

For years, Amazing Group has operated a "flipped working" model - where the traditional paradigm of work is flipped on its head. Instead of being made to juggle individual tasks with unexpected, unnecessary meetings and other distractions, productive individual work is done outside of the office, on people's own time, in their own place, at their own pace. 

Leaders are liberated from enforcing time-based productivity, and don’t need to be babysitters. Instead they become coaches, enablers, and facilitators focused on unlocking each team member's unique value to the entire organization. Consequently, Amazing Group's offices have transformed into a space purely dedicated to meeting people, asking questions, brainstorming, and making unexpected connections. 

With an army of freelancers doing productive work outside the office and a wealth of flexible office space at its disposal, Amazing Group now has to deal with another problem: knowledge distribution and resource allocation. The Group decided to develop an app to meet the needs.

Working on the foundations of a previous iOS app, Amazing Group's tech team interviewed leaders and frontline workers to get a sense of problem areas, bottlenecks and frustrations. The goal was not only to develop an app that would immediately replace the current app with a refreshed interface, the app would have to be cross-device compatible and have a positive impact on the bottom line - a 9-week development timeline of 4 stages:

1. Develop a UI/UX prototype for management approval and feedback (completed on 22 February 2019)

2. Develop a working app that will replace the current app with the following basic functions: public events display, meeting room booking and knowledgebase repository (completed on 6 March 2019)

3. Add further functions to the app, including a landing page with monthly timetable view, promotions and weekly/monthly highlights (completed on 14 March 2019)

4. Polish the app, add user management function, add member e-card display (with QR code) and begin trials for adding scanned codes and related info to a google docs spreadsheet.

The key issues at this stage were to enhance the UI/UX and develop a prototype satisfactory to the leaders so the project could be given the green light. Changes needed to be fundamental enough to justify the development of a new app on a different framework yet sufficiently familiar so not to cause confusion.

The app was developed on the React Native framework for cross-device compatibility - a major problem in the past when Java and Swift were used for iOS only. React Native has an active community of developers so major components would not need to be reinvented or re-written.

User authentication: Users had differing levels of permissions to access different app functions. That was sorted out first since we needed to have the app working for each level of users at this stage. We used oAuth with users' gmail accounts verified against an internal whitelist of users (our own user database). That removed the need for users to create new accounts with new accounts, keeping their digital lives simple. We understand this may frustrate access from countries where gmail is blocked and new login methods will be developed when a use case arises.

Promotions view: In order to remain engaging to users, the app has a first page view of oft-requested promotion flyers and posters that are updated regularly. Users can view them and send them to friends, as appropriate. 

Event display: The list of events is taken off Shopify, using their API tools. Tapping into an event launches an inline web viewer which displays website contents directly. 

Cloud library: Amazing Group has an ever-growing repository of product literature, and seminar recordings. These are listed in a view and each item can be opened in the relevant app.

Room booking: We simplified the bookings process by reducing the calendar view to 7 days (today up to 7 days from today) and limiting appointments to one or more half hour segments either starting on the hour or half hour. Each office floor has a tab so users can select the desired floor for booking. Then bookings for each floor are listed. The information for bookings is stored on a database so a website can easily take data from it for display (e.g. at reception or at individual rooms). 

Each room has distinct permissions, so booking options are removed for certain classes of users. Rooms can be added directly to the remote database so the app does not need to be updated and published to use new rooms (or be prevented from using old rooms).