OALK
An organic communication software for working from home(WFH) employees, to enhance the communication and relationship between colleagues.
Product feature
3
different ways to contact the colleague
2
moments to meet colleagues
1
technique to relieve stress
Responsibilities:
UIUX design / UX research
Duration:
Three months (Jul.2021-Sep.2021)
Brief
Background
After the COVID-19 virus outbreak in 2020, working from home (WFH) became a new trend of working style. Big companies announce new WFH policies such as Facebook and Google.
Problem
#1 Colleagues have fewer chances for casual conversation or spontaneous talk.
#2 People burn out during WFH since they cannot unplug their work.
#3 The boundary between work and life is blurred since WFH forces people to stay in the same space.
Aim
To design a tool to address issues around WFH, help people adopt and achieve a better work-life balance.
Design Process
Double Diamond
The design process followed the double diamond design framework. I began by doing secondary research and primary research to define the problem. Then I planned to develop the concept by the persona and user journey and validate the prototype in the end, and if there is enough time, I can modify the prototype from the feedback.
Discover
Survey
Valid data : 22
Aged : 25 to 50
Questions : 38
The insights from the online survey are:
Nearly 70% of people prefer meeting with colleagues in person rather than online meetings. The reasons for that are less efficiency and exhaustion.
Over 60% felt more isolated than working in the office. And 41% of people spent more time on their work and even over 2 hours accounted for over 50%.
Workshop
Participants : 9
Time : 1.5 hours
Main Activity : Card sorting
The insights from the workshop are:
The biggest problem after they prioritized is the blurred boundary between work and personal life. The second problem is online communication is inefficient if there is a physical object to discuss.
Two activities they missed the most were having lunch with colleagues and a water cooler chat.
Interview
Interviews : 5
Open-ended Questions : 18
Analysis : Thematic Analysis
The insights from interviews are:
The interviewees' answers replied that they missed the casual conversation when they were in the office.
The boundary of life and work is an issue for them since they usually work too late and do not know when they can stop.
Define
Market analysis
After analysis, most services and devices focus on the business conversation between employees on the market. However, working in the office for employees is not always working.
The result finds that there is a gap in these services and products. How to create casual and spontaneous talk during the working period at home will be a niche point.
Persona and User Journey
There are two personas and user journeys I made based on the research. It helped the entire project not lose focus and kept me in the right direction and find opportunities.
Robert is an engineer. During the pandemic, he works in his room, which causes him to have very blurred boundaries of work and life. He can not control his work time well and work overtime almost every day.
“My pain point is that I don't control my work time well. I will work overtime almost every day.“
Ellie is a freelancer and works for a company part-time. She thinks working from home is an excellent option for freelancers, but communication with colleagues becomes more complicated than working in the office.
“I think that is the disadvantage that you sometimes miss some information that you will learn in the office.“
Find insights
After analyzing and synthesizing the research, here are five insights that I would like to approach
Employees would like to have an efficient way to communicate.
Employees still need to have informal communication with team members or random colleagues from the different departments.
Clear work and life boundaries help employees can relax after work.
Employees need a way to relieve stress.
Develop
Solution from insight
Create moments to meet your colleagues
More face-to-face communication
Create a ritual to set the boundary
Remind users to take a break
Site map
There would be a colleague’s figure for users to interact more to improve communication. Creating moments to trigger spontaneous talk could be defined by time, and the system will notify users to take a break and meet others. Under the personal figure, it records the entire working time and the tool gave the rewards when users made their work and life balance.
User Flow
It is a communication tool for business use. Therefore it includes login and logout to identify the user is an employee for creating ritual. Three communication ways to contact your colleagues, and the user could choose either way depending on their colleague’s status. There are two moments for meeting colleagues are lunchtime and breaktime, and they could decide to join the space. And there is a taking breath technique when the user is detected in the negative emotion.
Final Design
Communication
Quick Talk 📢
The function only appears when the colleague’s figure is not busy. The user can start talking immediately without arranging a meeting, just like they are in the office.
Video Clip 🎥
If there is a physical product to discuss and it is not in a hurry. Video clip could record the video through the camera rapidly. After finishing the recording and the video will be sent to the colleague.
Message 💬
The message window includes the colleague’s status and the previous message with time. The user’s history message will also appear in the window.
Meet colleagues
Lunchtime 🍱
The system will notice that it is time to have lunch; the window will pop out and ask the user if it is time for lunch. If the user decides to have lunch, the user can decide to have lunch with colleagues randomly or choose colleagues by himself. Then the system will transit and change the screen to the launch environment with other team members.
People still have the right to choose their close friends to eat together from the colleague list. According to the feedback, lunchtime may be the time for relaxing in the middle of the day and not everyone wants to have social activities.
Tea break ☕
The system will detect the employee’s status, which is not busy or finish a task. If the user still wants to keep working and still can choose to keep working. However, if the user wants to have a short break and meet others, the system will match colleagues in the same status and bring them together in the water cooler space.
Relieve stress
Take a breath 🧘♂️
The system can detect the users’ emotions, and when they feel negative emotions such as anxiety, the system will pop out the screen of taking a breath. The user can choose to enter the releasing activity that the system prepared, which is called 4-7-8 breathing technique.
Break the boundary
Create your ritual 🔍
When opening the software on the laptop, a pop-up window will open the webcam to ask the user to scan the code on their phone. After the user scans the code to the webcam, the transition will appear, a person walking animation. This animation creates a moment for transiting the users’ mood and role to work as commuting.
Work-life balance
Time management 🕑
The system provides a visual chart for users to check the time they spend in this software when clicking the figure on the calendar section. They could know how much time they spend on the software.
The system will analyse the time of the week and give them a badge that encourages them to be a work-life balance person.
Validation
Usability Test
After building the hi-fi prototype, I would like to know whether my concept truly solves the problem. I uploaded it on Maze to conduct usability tests. I would like to test four main tasks: Login, Communication, Lunchtime, take a break function and take a breath function. Therefore I was a moderator in the test, brief the situation and five testers gave feedback individually after each mission.
Metrics
Task 1 : Log in and out the system
Goal : Check the login process and whether the mood has been changed.
Task 2 : Use communication function
Goal : Test the effect of three different functions to communicate with colleague.
Task 3 : Meet colleague in lunchtime and breaktime
Goal : See the increase of social networking moments helps casual interaction.
Task 4 : Use the function take a breath
Goal : Observe if users feel relaxed and reduce stress after the breathing technique.
Task 5 : Check the time chart
Goal : Confirm the chart can help to make work-life balance.
Feedback from usability test:
In the quick talk function, the webcam turned on immediately would be shocked without notification.
Everyone accepted the visual time chart; however, most testers did not want it to be recorded and seen by others, such as their boss. One tester is a manager; he thought it would be great to understand his team members’ workloads.
The function of taking a breath is helpful; if it could include music and it would be even better.
Takeaway
This project made me realise how to design a product from scratch. I implemented UX design methods to finalise my design with the double diamond process. Here are some points I had learned.
Ask right questions
After conducting research methods, I realized that asking the right questions is such an important thing, especially in interviews. It does not only guide users to tell the users’ true experience but it also allows them to share without any pressure.
Analysis and prioritzing
The data is massive and scattered, and it is hard to sort it at the beginning. As I conducted the workshop and interviews by myself, I watched the recording to document the insights. Finding similar patterns as a design direction and reorganising what they had said and why. This is a huge task but after finding the true and important insight and it is interesting.
Test to users and learn from users
Prototyping is an exciting part for me, however, I would never know what users think without testing. Users always impress me and give me lots of inspiration. Therefore, after the great ideas come to me, I would like to get feedback from users ASAP.