Bring conversation, spontaneity, and joy back to remote work.
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Sep 2021 - Nov 2021
Sponsored Project
Figma
Notion
Miro
Antara Jagtap
Hasmitha Bhetam
Video chat tools enable employees to maintain relationships and collaborate from afar, but conversations are typically limited to our homes and offices. Furthermore, these interactions are scheduled, and spontaneity is limited to the fear of disturbing others.
With this background, InnovateMap came to use in hopes to improve the experience of working from home and bring chats, smiles, and surprise back to employees.
Build an online collaboration platform that helps remote workers start conversations with colleagues and build connections to keep in touch.
Users know if their colleagues are busy or not, and can reach out to them accordingly.
Users are reminded to take a break regularly. During break time, users will relax and enjoy fun activities with colleagues.
Users can play games together on Conet, which brings topics to talk about and memories to remember.
We developed several predispositions when we first encountered this problem. Predispositions are hypotheses that we think would be true about our target users and the problem. We developed these hypotheses to help us construct our interview and survey questions.
To understand the context of the problem, we read through some forum topics to explore users’ opinions and actions they take when working remotely on the internet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677665
We figured out that conversations are obviously far lower than “when you're all in the kitchen making breakfast or tea in the morning”. Employees seldom have spontaneous conversations when working at home. This also causes mental exhaustion for many employees, as they feel work drags on every day and is inhuman.
To further understand employees’ needs and frustrations, and find potential design solutions, we conducted a survey and an interview with 35 participants and 6 employees who are working remotely.
Through our survey, we found that 78% of the participants would choose “Fear of imposing” to be the reason for not starting a conversation. When working remotely, they do not know if others are busy or not, and fears that texting them directly might be imposing or can not be responded to.
Fun activities make it easier to connect with colleagues, as mentioned by 4 out of 6 interviewees. During these activities, employees can “work” on the same platform and environment, which provides chances and spontaneity for conversations.
We used Affinity Diagramming to synthesize all research findings and results in our group by writing down different points on stickers and putting similar ones together. In this way, we found that the absence of conversation is the key pain point that remote workers are facing.
Working from home reduces conversations between colleagues, which causes not only low efficiency but also mentally exhausting.
By bringing conversations back to remote employees, we can not only facilitate communication and collaboration at work, but also provide better work-life balance.
Armed with insights, we conducted a concept relay to quickly generate ideas in a team. In a concept relay, each one of us first comes up with solutions based on the insights. Then we come together to gather, compare and categorize our ideas to come up with better solutions.
One idea is to use some methods to let workers be able to know if the colleague he/she wants to reach out to is busy or not. On the other hand, he/she will also show his/her status to colleagues so that others can contact them accordingly.
♻️ In our final product, we did not use the doll to show status, because we think it is not very feasible. Instead, we use colors which is simple but powerful.
Another idea is to match workers with colleagues based on their interests and hobbies. By matching workers with colleagues, a chance for conversation is provided, and shared interests or hobbies could provide topics for conversations.
♻️ We agree that this way of conversation matching is too straightforward, and we do not want to force users, so we adjust this idea into game-matching and integrate it into our final product.
In the end, our concept is an online communication platform. On the platform, employees can schedule their work, set their status, and check others’ availabilities. There is also a POMODORO timer on it, which will remind them to take breaks regularly, and enter a break mode. In the break mode, they can have casual conversations with colleagues and build connections.
A POMODORO Timer (click to see the example) is a time management method. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.
We built some low-fidelity wireframes based on our concept and planned to use these screens for some quick user testing to get feedback and iterate.
We conducted user testing with 4 users and a cognitive walkthrough by ourselves. We wanted to receive feedback from end-users and understand their opinion about our concept and prototype, which are later used in the iteration phase.
We used bubbles to indicate the availability of colleagues, and created some illustrations around the collaborative tools. However, users do not know what the bubbles or the illustrations mean without our explanation.
We replaced the bubble with a colored circle around the avatar, and different colors indicate different statuses respectively. We also removed the illustration and make the icon of tools look more like a clickable button.
We provide users some buttons that can turn on/off the notification of the homepage. Users say they would like a more detailed page on which they can manage how their statuses are shown to others.
We designed a new page that allows users to manage their current tasks and status shown to others. They can see who is working on the same tasks and their status, as well as manage the status and message they want to let others see.
We designed a page on which users can start chats and other fun activities with their connections or random people in the same company. However, users think this page is overwhelming with too many texts and poor layout that they do not know what they can and should do.
We redesigned the layout of this page, and changed its color theme to one different from work mode to indicate that it is break mode now. We also simplified the page layout into larger text and buttons, which lower the cognitive load of the users and let them navigate through the page easily.
We iterated the wireframes into high-fi prototypes based on the feedback. The prototype has two main flows: start conversations in work mode by knowing others’ status, and start conversations in break mode by playing games (fun activities) together. The two flows are connected by the POMODORO timer.
The most tricky problem we encountered during our project is: how to encourage but not enforcing people to start a conversation. To solve this problem, we tried to think “aloud”, which is to ideate and write down whatever idea that came to us. Although most of them are discarded after we get feedback from users and peer designers, it still helped us to find the “right” solution.
If we had more time and resources, I would like to spend more time collecting data and testing with more real-world workers. Although we refined our prototype, it is still a raw thing without any data supporting it. If we could collect data on how long users want the break time to be, or how many users would participate in the activities during break(which was our KPI), it would help us improve our prototype.
