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From Events to Everyday:
Designing the Complete Virtual Office
How we evolved from virtual events to virtual offices by adding persistent communication, availability awareness, privacy controls, and collaboration tools to our existing spatial video platform.
Illustrated by Collin Pinegar
When I joined Kumospace in early 2022, we were beginning an exciting pivot. We'd moved from virtual events—online conferences and parties—to virtual offices for remote teams. The market opportunity felt huge, and we started with a beta program with 10 teams to test our assumptions as we built towards "the future of remote work".
My Role: Head of Product & Design
I led both product strategy and product design for this platform transformation, managing 1 product manager, 2 product designers, a 3D artist, and a product marketing manager, while working closely with 10 engineers split across mobile and desktop platforms.
Product Leadership
I defined quarterly product strategy that balanced the technical challenge of platform transformation with evolving user needs and competitive positioning. This included deciding which legacy event features to preserve, how to sequence new office capabilities, and when to shift priorities based on user insights. I managed feature prioritization across competing demands from different user segments while ensuring engineering bandwidth aligned with business impact.
Design Leadership
I drove the design strategy for the transformation, writing PRDs to align the team on problems and requirements. I guided designers through review sessions to ensure we stay consistent within our own design system and standard UX patterns while giving them creative ownership within clear problem definitions. When the company laid off designers in late 2023, I transitioned to hands-on design work, creating wireframes and final design hand-offs myself.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
I worked with the data team to design A/B tests, analyze feature usage patterns, and define success metrics for our integration features. I partnered closely with customer success to identify what was working and what wasn't, using their frontline feedback to inform our product decisions and feature iterations.
I worked with engineers closely from kick-offs to feature testing. When technical constraints conflicted with UX goals, we'd first investigate whether issues were user confusion or technical problems. For UX issues, we'd iterate designs. For technical issues, engineers would investigate solutions, and if the ideal technical solution wasn't viable, we'd design UX workarounds.
Project Management
The most challenging aspect was managing features at different stages simultaneously - researching and working with designers on future features, tracking current development (including scope adjustments and issue resolution), and analyzing results from shipped features to inform next plans. The entire integration took about a year, rolled out in phases.
The Challenge: Events vs Offices
An event platform optimizes for:
Short-term engagement and entertainment
Large groups gathering
Structured activities with clear start/end times
Maximum fun and interaction
A virtual office platform needs to support:
Daily, persistent collaboration
Ongoing relationships and team dynamics
Professional workflows and accountability
Productivity and engagement
Kumospace "Speakeasy", a room for virtual events
The Problem: Remote Work Reality We Were Solving
As we researched our new market, we discovered remote teams were struggling with fundamental workflow problems:
Tool Fatigue & Context Switching
Teams were constantly jumping between Slack for chat, Zoom for video calls, Google Calendar for scheduling, and email for follow-ups. Each switch broke focus and made it impossible to maintain conversational flow.
Invisible Colleagues
Unlike physical offices where you can see if someone's at their desk, in a meeting, or grabbing coffee, remote workers had no ambient awareness of their teammates. This led to awkward interruptions or missed opportunities for collaboration.
Lost Context & Scattered Conversations
Important discussions were split across platforms - quick decisions in Slack, detailed planning in video calls, follow-ups via email. Teams lost track of why decisions were made and couldn't easily reference past conversations.
No Spontaneous Collaboration
The natural "Can I grab you for a minute?" moments that drive innovation were nearly impossible remotely. Everything had to be scheduled, killing serendipitous problem-solving.
Meeting Friction
Even simple conversations required the overhead of "Let me send you a calendar invite" - creating barriers to the quick syncs that keep teams aligned. Sometimes sending a Slack message took hours to get a reply, making real-time collaboration nearly impossible.
Our Approach and Solutions
Privacy and Boundaries - Zone-Based Audio and Video
The Challenge
Our pivot from virtual events to virtual offices created a fundamental design challenge. Event platforms thrive on open interaction - everyone can see and hear everyone in one big space, creating energy and engagement. But professional work requires different levels of privacy: confidential client calls, sensitive discussions, focused deep work, and large presentations where not everyone needs to speak. How do you maintain the collaborative benefits of spatial awareness while enabling the privacy boundaries that professional teams need?
Our Approach
Internal Discovery
Using Kumospace as our own virtual office, we immediately realized that we wanted to see everyone in the office simultaneously while maintaining privacy options. Initially, rooms were in separate views, forcing users to leave their room and return to the "lobby" to see where teammates were located - breaking the natural awareness that makes offices effective.
Office Design Research
We researched physical office design layouts to understand the needs of an office besides conference rooms and offices. When do offices use pods vs personal offices vs cubicles? How are offices designed to enhance collaboration but also allow for deep focused work? And how does one design for flow to encourage the serendipitous meetings "water cooler" moments.
Maintaining Interaction Model
Since Kumospace already had an established spatial visual language where users move their avatar around with a mouse and interact with objects, we wanted to keep that interaction model consistent. Adding doors extended this existing language naturally - users could approach and interact with doors just like other objects in the space, maintaining the intuitive spatial metaphor while providing clear visual privacy cues.
Beta User Testing
We started our learning with the goal of getting 10 beta remote teams on board to use Kumospace as their virtual office. We tested office layouts internally and with beta teams to learn what virtual office design worked best for collaboration, focused work, and crossing paths. We experimented with pods, personal offices, cubicles, and even the controversial Munger Hall design by Charlie Munger for University of California, Santa Barbara.
A proposed design for Munger Hall, Van Tilburg, Banvard & Soderbergh, AIA
The Solution: Zone-Based Audio Architecture
Separate Audio Spaces
Rather than having everyone in one big audio space (like events), we built rooms that created distinct audio boundaries. When you entered a room, you only heard people in that room, enabling private conversations while others continued working in different spaces.
Visual Privacy Language
We established doors as the universal privacy signal. Public collaboration spaces remained doorless and open, encouraging spontaneous interaction. Offices and conference rooms featured doors that occupants could control, creating clear visual cues about accessibility.
When doors were closed, outsiders couldn't see the videos or screen sharing happening inside the room. But when doors were open, people could see the video feeds and what was being shared - just like walking by a conference room or public area in a physical office. This allowed for more transparency and awareness of ongoing work, while still providing privacy for confidential meetings.
Kumospace office layout based on Munger Hall, layout designed by me, 3D art by Alan Lee
Access Control System
Users inside rooms could open and close doors at will. When doors were closed, anyone outside had to "knock" - sending an audio alert to everyone inside the room. Any occupant could then choose to open the door, replicating natural office etiquette.
Smart Muting & Performance
Rooms could be configured to auto-mute newcomers, serving dual purposes. For large presentations, most attendees joined to listen rather than speak. For intimate meetings, everyone expected to participate. This also solved a technical challenge - reducing camera and microphone load when many people joined.
Room Types & Ownership
Personal offices: Spaces that could be decorated and personalized by their owners
Conference rooms: Bookable spaces with integrated calendars for formal scheduling
Open zones: Collaborative areas for spontaneous interaction
The Impact
Moving from one shared audio space to room-based audio was fundamental to the events-to-office transformation, enabling multiple simultaneous conversations and professional privacy.
Availability Awareness - Reducing Interruptions
The Challenge
In physical offices, you can glance over to see if a colleague is deep in focus, on a call, or available for a quick question. Remote work eliminated this ambient awareness, forcing teams to choose between awkward interruptions or the friction of switching to calendar apps to check availability. How do you enable the natural "is now a good time?" assessment without breaking workflow?
Our Approach
Beta Team Research
After 2 weeks of office usage, we would check in with the beta teams and send everyone on the team a survey. Key insights emerged:
People had their cameras off most of the time, so teammates didn't know if someone was away or actually there
Teams didn't know when was a good time to approach colleagues - they would often go to someone who wasn't available
Mixed reactions to spatial interaction: some people loved being able to walk up and talk to teammates, but others felt interrupted while trying to focus
This feedback led us to build availability features iteratively, starting with what we already had and adding layers based on user needs.
Tracking Adoption and Feedback
We tracked feature usage and user feedback for the availability features, validating that this was a real pain point for remote teams.
The Solution: Iterative Availability Features
Building on Existing Spatial Awareness
We already had spatial awareness - users could see where teammates were located in meeting rooms, shared workspaces, or private offices, providing immediate context about their current activity and likelihood of being interruptible.
Adding Status Indicators
We built status indicators (available, focusing, away) so users could communicate their work mode and give teammates clear signals about their availability. We combined status indicators with audio and mic management, so that it was only a toggle button—instead of clicking on mic, audio, and status separately.
Focusing = audio and mic off
Available = audio and mic on
Colleagues could still "nudge" them for urgent communication, sending a chime and notification
This balanced respect for focus time with the ability to reach someone when truly necessary.
Avatar states
Calendar Integration
Finally, we added calendar into the profile card. To see when someone would be free, users could hover over a teammate's avatar to see their current status and upcoming schedule - whether they were free immediately, busy for a few more minutes, or had back-to-back meetings. The hover interaction revealed schedule gaps, letting people make informed decisions about when to approach colleagues and coordinate timing without leaving the platform.
Profile card with calendar, by Anthony Zhang
The Impact
Status indicators became one of the top features, used on average 5.5x times a day by people who use it. Teams could respect each other's focus time while maintaining spontaneous collaboration opportunities. The friction of "let me check when you're free" was eliminated, enabling more natural communication patterns that balanced productivity with accessibility.
Conversation Continuity - All Communications in One Place
The Challenge
Remote teams were losing context as conversations scattered across platforms. Quick decisions happened in Slack, detailed planning occurred in video calls, and follow-ups lived in email. Teams lost track of why decisions were made and couldn't easily reference past conversations, creating knowledge gaps and repeated conversations.
Our Approach
Customer Development & Business Strategy
As we worked to convert trial users to paying customers, we consistently heard that teams didn't want to pay for separate services - Zoom for video, Slack for chat, Google or Notion for file management. This feedback revealed that conversation continuity wasn't just a UX problem, it was a business opportunity.
User Survey & Feature Gap Analysis
We sent out a survey to all our users asking if they were still using other chat or video conferencing apps alongside Kumospace. The results were eye-opening: 84% were still using other video conferencing apps and 80% were using other chat apps. The top reasons were that other teams in their company were using these tools and stability concerns.
Feature Prioritization
Through sales intake conversations and our user survey, we identified the essential features needed to replace Slack and Zoom. Meeting recordings was a top requested feature and structured chat features like searchable chat history, threads, channels, and groups were at the top of the list.
Competitive Analysis & Feature Strategy
We researched Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Workspace to understand how they manage chat, video, and files. All these applications were fully featured, and for us to catch up would take years. Instead of trying to build all features to compete, we decided to offer the core features teams actually use as a bundle for a cheaper price, allowing teams to save money by replacing multiple tools.
Internal Testing
We tested our approach internally first, replacing our own company Slack to validate that our feature set could actually support daily team operations before rolling it out to customers.
The Solution: Integrated Communication History
Persistent Chat Architecture
We built structured channels that maintained conversation history across all team interactions. Unlike temporary event chat, these channels preserved context over weeks and months, allowing teams to reference past decisions and maintain project continuity.
Meeting Recording Access
The ability to record conversations and access them later was available through the "recordings" section in the panel, so teams could reference important discussions when needed.
Chat Search
Users could search through all chat messages within the platform, making it easy to find past conversations and decisions without jumping between tools.
Seamless Communication Flow
Teams could start conversations in any mode - quick spatial chat while working, move to focused video discussion, then continue in structured chat channels - all within the same platform. Users never lost access to ongoing conversations and could search chat history and reference recordings later on.
The Impact
By housing all communications and discussions in one place, teams experienced more seamless collaboration and could easily find information without switching between tools. This also delivered cost savings - teams no longer needed to pay for separate chat and video applications.
Real-Time Collaboration - Screen Annotation and Engagement
The Challenge
When people work together side by side, they can naturally point to each other's screens, gesture to specific elements, and use body language to show engagement or direct attention. Remote work strips away these essential collaborative gestures, making it difficult for teams to work together effectively on shared tasks or provide real-time feedback during screen sharing sessions.
Our Approach
Identifying the Missing Piece
From our user survey, we learned that the most requested feature for video conferencing was annotation - the ability to mark up and point to specific elements during screen sharing work sessions.
Iterating for Speed
Rather than building a robust annotation tool, we built this feature incrementally so we could release it faster. First we added the ability to share your pointer so people could see what you were pointing to. Then we added the ability to draw. Adding emoji drawing was easy, so we added that and people really enjoyed it.
Cross-Modal Consistency
These collaboration features had to work seamlessly whether users were in map mode (seeing multiple screens) or gallery view (focused on one presentation)—allowing users to seamlessly switch back and forth while maintaining the interactive capabilities across different viewing contexts.
Tracking Adoption and Feedback
We tracked feature usage and user feedback for the screen annotation features, validating that this was something people really wanted.
The Solution: Interactive Visual Collaboration
Shared Pointer & Drawing Tools
We added the ability for users to toggle on their pointers so other users could see their pointer during screen sharing sessions, along with real-time drawing capabilities. Team members could circle important elements, draw arrows to highlight connections, or sketch out ideas directly on the shared screen - all visible to everyone in real-time.
Emoji Reactions
Users could stamp emojis directly onto the screen to react to specific content, providing immediate feedback and engagement without interrupting the flow of presentation.
Side-by-Side Screen Sharing
In map mode, users could see multiple screens being shared side-by-side simultaneously - essential for live collaborative work where team members needed to share their screens to work together on the same project in real-time.
The Impact
After launching the shared pointer feature, screen sharing usage increased by 2% within two weeks. The annotation tools transformed how teams collaborated - members could point to specific details, react with emojis, and work together in real-time when multiple people shared screens side-by-side. This shifted remote work sessions from passive viewing to active collaboration, enabling the kind of detailed visual discussions that drive better decisions. The side-by-side capability provided collaborative workflows that traditional video platforms couldn't support.
Unified Interface - Fitting Everything Seamlessly
The Challenge
How do you house a complete communication suite - spatial map, video calls, structured chat channels, group DMs, calendar integration - in one interface without overwhelming users? The core UX challenge was creating space for all these features while maintaining the primary goal: seamless communication and collaboration.
Our Approach
Design Considerations
We had two key considerations driving our interface design:
Reducing Learning Curve: Potential customers complained about "learning a new tool," so we wanted to make the first experience feel easy. Since a walkable virtual office was already foreign to most users, we designed for gradual feature discovery rather than overwhelming them with everything at once.
Encouraging Platform Adoption: We wanted users to adopt our chat features and integrate their calendars with Kumospace rather than continuing to use external tools. This meant exploring different layouts that would make our features discoverable and appealing.
Feature Grouping
We explored different grouping options to make the interface look clean while ensuring discoverability. We chose to divide features across areas - grouping audio and video tools in a bottom toolbar, navigation and map tools together, and search, chat, calendar, and video recordings in a left panel design.
Reconsidering the UI System
Initially when we were doing events, windows worked fine because we had a simple ephemeral chat system where we didn't need to save chats and people didn't need to keep windows open - the interaction was focused on the space and video calls between people. As we layered on features, we quickly saw that managing windows was a problem and it also obstructed the view of the map. Users had to close windows to move or see people. We needed a system where opening a tool wouldn't block the view of the map - it might push the map over or make the visual area smaller, but wouldn't block interactions on the map.
Incremental Rollout & Testing
Since this was a major redesign, we rolled out the new panel system incrementally to our user base to gather feedback and catch any major bugs. Additionally, we kept an eye on newly created spaces that had the new design. We tracked invitation rates, first-time time spent in the space, and feature usage.
The Evolution: From Windows to Panels
As we layered on features for virtual offices, our original window-based chat system became unworkable. Users ended up with multiple chat windows cluttering their view and blocking spatial navigation.
To support a complete chat system with searchable channels and group DMs, we redesigned the entire communication experience into a unified panel system.
The panel system created dedicated space for:
Structured chat channels for organized team conversations
Group DMs for quick coordination
Search functionality across all conversations
Calendar integration for scheduling and availability
This allowed users to access the full communication suite while maintaining their primary view options. Users could seamlessly switch between two primary modes while keeping panel access:
Map mode: Full spatial awareness of the virtual office
Gallery view: Focused video conferencing (like Google Meet/Zoom)
The Impact
After launching the shared pointer feature, screen sharing usage increased by 2% within two weeks. The annotation tools transformed how teams collaborated - members could point to specific details, react with emojis, and work together in real-time when multiple people shared screens side-by-side. This shifted remote work sessions from passive viewing to active collaboration, enabling the kind of detailed visual discussions that drive better decisions. The side-by-side capability provided collaborative workflows that traditional video platforms couldn't support.
* We initially made panels persistent to encourage feature discovery, but anticipated users would want to hide them for a bigger office view. We tested this directly - users did complain - and since we had a backup design ready, implementing the show/hide functionality was an easy change.
Results & What I Learned
We successfully transformed the platform from virtual events to virtual offices, with the company hitting $1M ARR within one year. Although we built a lot and learned a lot, we also realized that the market was not as big as we thought. Eventually, leadership decided to pivot the company based on these market realities.
Transforming a platform from one use case to another requires more than just adding features - it means fundamentally rethinking user workflows and behaviors. The challenge wasn't technical complexity but understanding how to preserve what made the original platform valuable while solving entirely different user needs. This taught me that successful platform evolution requires deep user research and systematic testing at every step.
This project expanded my leadership scope from design collaboration to full product strategy coordination across engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and data teams. I learned that translating user insights into aligned organizational action requires understanding how each function operates and ensuring everyone understands not just what we're building, but why. Design thinking provided a systematic foundation, but I had to develop new skills in business strategy and operational coordination to drive complex product decisions forward.