DROP-IN

App design

Role
Product designer
Timeline
4 weeks
Team
Founder, Club Manager and Co Founder
The Drop-in home screen

Overview

Drop-in is an independent work club and coffee house with three sites in London: Clapton, Richmond and Wandsworth. Members rent desks, phone booths and meeting rooms by the hour.

Members working beneath a wall of framed prints at Drop-in Clapton
The coffee counter at Drop-in Clapton
The lounge and mezzanine at Drop-in Wandsworth
Phone booths at Drop-in Clapton
Phone booths at Drop-in Richmond
Desks at Drop-in Wandsworth
A dog under the desks at Drop-in Clapton
Plant-lined desks at Drop-in Richmond

What did I do?

  • Product strategy and the pitch to build in-house
  • User research
  • UI design in Figma
  • Building the iOS app in SwiftUI with Claude Code

Project timeline

Four weeks, six phases. We started by running a survey with users and understanding the problems with the current app. The main issues were getting through the door and the annoying payment pop-up that appeared every time they opened the app. Then, I made the case for building our own app and why we couldn’t fix these issues within the current one. Design came next: the flows and screens. The build was done in SwiftUI on top of the existing Optix API. We tested it with a few members first through TestFlight and then shipped it at the end.

  1. Ran a survey with users

    Week 1

  2. Pitch to build in-house

    Weeks 1 to 2

  3. Design the flow

    Weeks 1 to 3

  4. Build the app using SwiftUI and the Optix API

    Weeks 2 to 4

  5. Test with members through TestFlight

    Weeks 3 to 4

  6. Ship

    Week 4

Problems with the app we had

    Valentina

    • Books a desk most weeks at Clapton
    • Uses the gates several times a day
    • Opens the app on a Tuesday morning to book a desk before heading in
  1. A payment method, before anything else
    Every time I open it there's a pop-up before I can do anything. I only came to book a desk.
  2. The old app's home screen
  3. Two listings, both called Wandsworth Full Day
    I never know which one to pick. The names don't tell you whether it's a desk or a room.
  4. One time slot available, eight until seven
  5. The booking, as a record with invitees and a payment account

    Valentina

    • Books a desk most weeks at Clapton
    • Uses the gates several times a day
    • Gets to the club and opens the app to let herself in
  1. The same payment sheet, on opening the app again
  2. Home again, with Unlock doors as one tile among several
  3. All locks, listed by name, each one a tap further in
    That's a lot of steps just to open a door. Ohh, I have to do these every time I want to get in.

The main blocker

We couldn't change things in the app easily, because it was built using a third-party software called Optix.

Main decision

Since there was so little we could change in the app we had, the real question was whether to build our own. We put both options side by side and wrote out the pros and cons: keep asking Optix for changes, or build a new front end on the same data.

Deciding factors

API call limits
Time
Maintenance cost
Testing

Wireframes

I sketched a few different options for every screen, from booking and doors to bookings and events, and kept iterating on them until the flow felt right.

Redesigned the homescreen

The old app put a payment method in front of you before it let you do anything. Added a clear Book a desk button, as this is the main action members take.

Redesigned the homescreen

Clear resource type

A desk, a phonebooth, a meeting room, shot in the actual space, so you recognise what you are booking before you read a word.

Clear resource type

Removed the duplicate Full Day cards

The old Full Day screen showed the same card twice, then made you pick a slot on top, which added taps. Now you pick a day and book.

Removed the duplicate Full Day cards

Booking confirmation

A sheet comes up with the resource type, the date, the hours and the address of the club you booked.

Booking confirmation

Access the space CTA

Once a booking is live, Book a desk turns into Access the space.

Access the space CTA

Door unlock screen

The same screen carries a Quick Unlock card: put the unlock button on your Home Screen, and you stop having to open the app every time you need a gate.

Door unlock screen

Open Doors widget

Three steps put it on your Home Screen. After that, getting in never involves opening the app at all.

Open Doors widget
Drop-in app screen
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Building it with AI

This was the first time I built an iOS app by myself. I never really liked coding, but with agentic AI tools like Claude Code and Codex, it has become much easier to build apps when you have the right guardrails in place.

While I was building it, my biggest concern was the API call limits of the Optix API. I wanted to make sure the app would continue to work as we scaled, so I had several meetings with the Optix team. We eventually used the per-member API to solve this problem.

This project also taught me a lot about how AI can make mistakes if you don’t prompt it well or give it the right guardrails. I ended up creating a framework for consistently getting the output I wanted from Claude by using different MCPs, including Mobbin, LottieFiles, Magnific, and Figma. These helped give Claude the context it needed to produce better results.

Impact

These are some of the success metrics, where the north star is bookings per day. Not sharing the numbers publicly for confidentiality reasons :)

Booking metrics

Bookings per day
Time from opening the app to confirmed
Drop-off inside the booking flow
Members who book again that week

Access metrics

Door unlocks per visit
Quick Unlock widgets added
Unlocks without opening the app

Qualitative

What members say at the desk
App Store reviews

Thanks for reading.