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Behind the build · Deskly
Designing a desk for everyone, when there weren't enough desks.
How I turned a space crunch at ValPay HQ into a ten-second booking, designed in Figma and built with Claude.
ValPay HQ was filling up faster than the floor plan could keep pace. The team was growing, hybrid schedules meant nobody quite knew who'd be in on a given day, and on the busy days there were simply more people than desks. Deskly is how I turned that space crunch into something people barely have to think about.
The real problem wasn't a booking form
It would have been easy to build a calendar and call it done. But the pain wasn't the act of reserving a desk. It was the uncertainty around it. People drove in and found nowhere to sit. Others stayed home on days the office was half empty. The question everyone actually had was social, not logistical: who else is coming in, and when should I? I designed around that question first.
Plan your week, don't book a desk
So Deskly frames the whole experience as planning a week, not booking a desk. A live office map shows every desk's status at a glance. Team presence lets you see who's in and choose to sit near the people you need that day. Admins get lightweight controls for capacity and reservations without turning the tool into a chore. Booking is two taps, but it's the presence layer that makes people open the app in the first place.
Built with Claude, validated before engineering
I designed in Figma and built the working prototype with Claude. That mattered: instead of a static mockup, I had an interactive prototype covering the map, calendar, team view, and admin. Something people could actually click through. It let me pressure-test the flows and the copy before a single hour of engineering time was spent, and it made the "who's in Thursday?" moment real enough to get honest feedback.
What it does now
The result turns a space crunch into a ten-second booking. A fast-growing team shares desks without friction, and anyone can see who's in on Thursday without firing off a single Slack message. Deskly is the kind of internal tool that only works if it respects how people actually behave, and that's the thread I try to pull through everything I design.