Office Space By The Hour
How many of us have been in the situation where we have been in a new place – a new city or new corner of our city and have a need to work for a few hours or have a formal meeting and we don’t have a place.
How many of us, who have offices, have desks which are not in use or conference rooms that are only used for a few hours a day? How we wish, we could find some way to utilize such spaces.
RentOspace is designed to fill that need by helping offices to put up spaces – desks, meeting rooms, cabins which can be rented by the hour. It makes it easy for people who need such spaces to find them and book them in multiples of one hour.
Nuage as the technology partner, designed and built the solution which is available on Web and as an App on Android and iOS platforms.
Client
The client is a start-up that wants to focus on office space aggregation. The two founders come from a hospitality, travel and property development background. This gives them a unique insight into the opportunity in the aggregation of free desks, cabins and conference rooms in offices.
Business Goal
To provide a technology platform facilitating users and the business space owners in making reservations for Business Conference rooms, cabins, hot desk, office space, etc.
Nuage Solution
We made two separate interfaces for Renter and Space Provider as both had a different set of requirements and goals.
1) Renter – Users who are going to rent the spaces
2) Space Provider – Users who put up spaces on rent.
The Renter Interface
To start with, the renter interface gives the renter the option of searching the available properties from the network of locations given. To help him select his preferred space from a plethora of choices, we have developed filter functionality so that he can keep aspects like radius (distance from the current location), date range, time slot, amenities and space type in focus. Once the user selects his space, we help him go ahead with his bookings via a booking tab developed by us. It also has the added feature of extending the bookings. Knowing well how difficult it can be for the renter to keep a track of his bookings, we developed a separate section that has the ability to show all the bookings to date. We also integrated Rentospace wallet keeping in mind situations where the renter might cancel his bookings and expects a refund back to the wallet. We then developed tabs for Feedback, Filter results and Save a Search for the users.
The Space Provider Interface
This interface gives the provider the facility of viewing and listing their spaces with the amenities that they have, along with viewing the number of bookings done for space. Understanding that there can be times when the space provider might not be able to give out his spaces, we have added block date feature in this interface which renders the space unavailable for bookings for the time chosen by the space provider. The owner can also keep a track of the money earnt and hours utilized by renters by getting a detailed report on the same. We have also made a feedback tab for the owner interface.
Our Challenges
The team faced challenges in Google Maps implementation on the iOS platform as the pins were not being supported. Our team did a lot of R&D for finding the solution for it. Finally, the expert technical team at Nuage customized the pins and replaced the icon marker of Google with these customized pins.
Technology Stack
Frontend: Ionic, Angular 5, jQuery, CSS 5, JavaScript
Backend: Python Flask, Swagger
Database: MySQL
Payment Gateway: Razorpay
Push Notifications: OneSignal
Business Outcomes
By using our platform, the client has become a preferred facilitator connecting Renters and the Premises Owner (supplier) for Business Conference Rooms and Facilities and in providing Office on the Go to those looking for office premises for a short amount of time at the click of a button.