EF Virtual Office

EF has beautiful offices worldwide and often invites customers in for consultations. But when the Covid19 pandemic hit, we had to develop a virtual alternative rapidly.

We wanted to create an in-office like experience and, at the same time, give our sales staff and account managers easy access to the right content on the fly.

We conducted remote interviews with sales staff in different markets to learn about their sales process and the challenges of suddenly shifting to a remote sales process.

We quickly started prototyping, and during the design process, we kept testing our prototypes of increasing fidelity with different sales and account management teams.

We created our custom backgrounds in close collaboration with our Design & Architecture team.

We wanted to move fast, and while LangTech (the technology unit of the EF Language division) prepared for a more solid build, we created a ReactJS app wrapped in Electron, communicating with OBS through web sockets.

This setup allowed us to iterate on design and functionality quickly and gave us a way to install the prototype on both Mac and Windows machines with a diverse range of users in different locations.

We created a native Windows application providing our sales staff with a unique EF background, easy access to sharable presentations, images and videos, and the option to browse the web effortlessly while deciding how to present.

The EF Virtual Office desktop app works with Teams, Zoom, and any other online meeting platform that supports virtual cameras.

The project is currently developed and maintained by our LangTech team in Zurich. The native Windows app is globally available to sales staff through our internal app store.