SF Relocation Guide
Wish HQ in San Francisco welcomes approximately 200 new interns and full-time employees every year – a majority of whom are from out-of-state and Canada. In a city as diverse as San Francisco, easily-accessible city resources are essential for a smooth move-in experience.
The previous relocation guide (shown above) was disorganized, outdated, and unattractive. It lacked brand personality and failed to excite users about the prospect of moving to San Francisco. Since San Francisco is Wish HQ and the largest Wish office, it was critical that the new guide provide a positive first impression of the company for incoming new hires.
Thus, my main goal for this project is to have users not only be excited to move to San Francisco, but also to start working at Wish. In order to understand what resources were most important and/or currently lacking, I spent time interviewing new employees and interns across the company. My main question was: “What do you wish you had known before arriving in SF?”
Overall, the responses reflected a need for more/better information regarding house-hunting (especially short-term leases), entertainment opportunities, and the type of weather to expect. This last point was a particular complaint from the intern group, many of whom had packed the wrong wardrobe for San Francisco’s chilly summers.
With these pain points in mind, I did research on newer and more comprehensive resources to add to the guide. I worked closely with the HR team to iterate through numerous versions of the new guide. Although I was only tasked with reformatting the original content, I took it upon myself to rewrite much of the copy, update resource hyperlinks, and reorganize the content by chronological importance. What information should new hires know before they move? What do they need when they first arrive? What will be useful in the future?
The result (sample below) is a boldly colorful yet streamlined guide. I edited open-source images to fit a cohesive style, and kept text to a minimum for a more interesting read. As this guide will be distributed digitally, I color-coded different sections and maintained consistent headers/footers for easy navigation. Additionally, the grid layout makes updating content simple (especially for non-designers).
Finally, I curated a 3-page style guide detailing everything from line height to photo-editing settings. Not only will this make updating the SF guide more straightforward, but it will also help Wish offices in other cities (such as Toronto, Amsterdam, etc) design their own relocation guides based on SF HQ.
