We Spent 100 Hours Listening To Customers. Here’s What We Built.

This portal started with a conversation. Almost 100 hours of them, actually.

If we look back at the beginning of coworking, it was always about bringing people together and putting community at the core of the experience. It’s a motto we at Nexudus live by, and it weaves through everything we do. The new Members Portal redesign was no different.

Having spent a few years in coworking community management before moving into product and design, it has always been incredibly important to me to stay close to the people I’m designing and building software for. Keep your ear to the ground. Limit assumptions, and validate the ones you do have to make. With the Members Portal redesign, one of our key goals was to keep you, our customers, engaged throughout the entire process.

What does that look like in practice? Around 5,715 minutes, or 95+ hours, of conversations with customers (and likely more, as this only counts the official calendar meetings, not the ad-hoc conversations in between). Discovery calls and site visits in the early stages. Open format focus sessions sharing early progress. Follow-up calls during validation and beta testing.

Real people, real spaces, real feedback.

Understanding how coworking members actually use a portal

Why did we do this? Because we wanted to better understand how members actually use a portal today — where the friction is, where things break down, and what’s genuinely working well. We wanted to understand what success looks like for our customers, whether that’s increased booking revenue, stronger community engagement, or simply fewer support tickets on a Monday morning.

A few themes came through loud and clear.

Space operators want a portal that truly looks and feels like their brand — not like every other platform — and the flexibility to build a more personalized experience for their members.

Members want to make a booking in as few clicks as possible, with a checkout experience that feels as natural as buying something online. One member put it simply: “Ideally, one click.” That stuck with us.

Consistency matters, too. Whether it’s a member’s first booking or their tenth, that experience should feel familiar and easy every time. This becomes a real challenge when bookings originate from third-party integrations or plugins. They might deliver a great first impression, but then drop the member into a completely different experience on their return. Members start to wonder if they’re in the right place. That doubt adds up.

Members also don’t always have time to go exploring. They want to discover what’s available to them in the moment they need it, not after three menus and a scroll.

Turning real conversations into product decisions

This project was never about building a list of features. It was about learning how people actually experience the portal in their day-to-day work and visits. One where members can do what they came to do without really having to think about it, and hopefully enjoy it along the way.

That thinking directly shaped why we built what we built.

The new drag-and-drop editor means updates no longer risk breaking your custom design. It’s what shaped the embedded e-commerce widget, so your members never get redirected away from your brand throughout the booking journey. It’s why we overhauled the checkout flow and introduced guest checkout so visitors can book without hitting a wall before they’ve even signed up. And it’s why one-click bookings for logged-in members are now a reality, not just a wishlist item.

Each of these changes traces back to a real conversation, a real frustration, a real person who gave us their time.

Why the conversation doesn’t stop here

This portal exists because our customers were generous with their time and honesty. But the conversation doesn’t stop at launch. Great spaces keep evolving because their communities keep talking, and so will we.

We’ll continue staying close to you and your members to understand how the new portal is working in practice and where we can make it even better. There’s already a strong backlog of ideas for what comes next.