No More Compromises — Here comes a sharable desk to enhance the home office experience.
Yes! You heard it right. From now on people don’t need to spend their time and energy while trying to find multiple workspaces, if they want to share their work desk at home. Want to know how?
Come I’ll tell you. But, First let me show you the product. So, I named the product as “ Desmontable” meaning Detachable in Spanish. Yes, it is a detachable table which can be used by more than one person at a time.
What is the Problem: What can we do to achieve a shared desk at home, which can also be used for multiple purposes?
What I did to solve the problem: After doing the primary researching which is conducting user interviews. From the insights of those interviews, I understood that most of my users are working from home. And as they are working from home they are almost always accompanied by a family member/partner who might/might not, also use the Work same space, so user will have to give away the space for some time. Which disturbs the privacy of the user which will affect the flow/mood of the work.
So to tackle that user need a sharable work desk. Where his work is not disturbed and also the other family member can also use that.
This is also helping users to move the work desk without disturbing the setup which is removing the monotonous nature of the work enabling users to work from anywhere in the house without any hassle.
Hold on… if you are coming to conclusions thinking that all these happened in a single day/night at an instance. I am sorry!! but that is not how it happened.
It started when our Mentor Anudeep Ayyagari, formed us into a group of ten and asked us to fight for an Area in the house. This is done as a part of the mentorship program which I am part with Growthschool under the guidance of Anudeep Ayyagari.
I chose Bathroom as my first space. But, I couldn’t validate the unfair advantages that I have w.r.t the area, with one of my teammates and I lost it to her. Then I slowly realized that it is not a task just to test your argumental skills but also to test how fast you can move on while you are learning.
So, After bathroom my eyes started to give attention to the home office. As most of the people started work from home since COVID. I thought of exploring it a little more. How can I know about the space as I am not the user?
Exploring the User’s world: Empathize
I need to do the primary research to get the qualitative data from the users, for which I need to conduct user interviews. Here user’s time is precious to us and we need to make the most out of it. We should make sure the user is comfortable enough ( the more comfortable the user the more he talks about the space) to share the experience of him/her w.r.t the space. So to start up I asked a few questions with which I can understand my users behavior, interaction and gaps that they are having with the respective space.
Things That I learned after I was done with the interview.
- Most of my questions are at the basic level and I should have added more WHY’s during the interview. Which would have helped me take better insights.
- Don’t get carried away in the conversation.
- Taking notes during the interview is important.
What I realized after the interviews:
Most of my users are living in TIER 1 CITIES and that too in apartments. They don’t have a dedicated room to arrange a home office. Instead they have a dedicated desk space in the bedroom/Hall.
Why are the users not happy? Define
After the interviews are done. I sat down to write down the insights from the data collected through the interviews. Then after re-writing the insights for multiple times ( more than 4 times). I understood that I am missing something, even if I miss something. Now I am not supposed to go back to my users to ask any sort of questions.
Then I sat and started to watch the recorded interviews again and came to know that I didn’t read between the lines when the user is actually giving me a lot of data indirectly. Validating that data along with the notes that I took while the interview actually happened, I was able to identify the pain points and define the problems.
These are the problems my users are facing:
After Identifying the problems, I rearranged the problems based on the importance of addressing them with my user demographics and why it is important to address that particular problem in an hierarchy. But anyways came up with ideas for each problem.
Thinking of the solution. Ideate:
As I defined the problems, now it is time for me to list the ideas for each defined problem. For this I used the crazy 8 technique ( for each problem I need to come up with 8 ideas within 8 minutes of time). A timer is set for 8 mins, while thinking of solutions it is easy to get 2–3 ideas within 3 mins but as the time starts to drain the brain really stops thinking. But I somehow managed to get 30 Ideas for 8 problems that i stated.
But, this is not done yet. I need to figure out the TOP Three Ideas out of the 30 Ideas I just got. I decided to filter them by applying constraints like is the problem practical in nature, how it benefits the users and is it Doable?
After doing that these are the top THREE IDEA’S, I decided to work on.
TOP 1:
IDEA: A desk which the user can detach and move but the remaining desk can be used by the family member.
REASON: As most of the users are sharing the desk space with a family member, Privacy is disturbed which will affect the flow/mood of the work. It also solves, few other problems like Working at one place all the time makes it monotonous for the user, Users feel like they don’t have enough breaks draining out their energy and want to quick refresh and recharge
TOP 2:
IDEA: Integrating a mechanism to the desk so that the desk can be automatically raised and lowered in regular intervals which in turn makes the user stand and sit Periodically.
REASON: There are ergonomic issues or back pain issues which affects the long term health and most of the the users I interviewed are working more than 10 hours a day so addressing this issue is important for this set of users.
TOP 3:
IDEA: Having a digital desk where all data is stored in it so that there is no need for desk space.
REASON: Having a digital desk which can enable users to feed in whatever the information regardless of the medium of feed in. Helps users to have a clutter free desk.
Realization: Be ready to let go of the ideas. Don’t get emotionally invested in them.
It is now time for me to select the one Idea that will work for a large number of users. And start building a product.
Shaping the idea: Prototype.
Problem that I want to address: Most of my users are working at the desk for more than 8 hours a day. Which is making the working environment monotonous. Adding on to that my users are also sharing the work desk with at least one of their family members.
Users are feeling their privacy is being invaded as they share space with the family member and also they can’t restrict the family member to stop using the desk space.
Even If the user wants to adjust the timing with the family members about the desk usability they have to compromise on a lot of things.
So, to address these I am introducing the detachable desk “Desmontable”.
Brief about the product:
This product is an easy detachable desk with mobility. Having this at home helps users to have a shared space without any privacy issues.
Also if the user ever wants to feel the need to have a change of environment they can easily use this and from anywhere in the house.
It also has a feature to adjust the height as per the user needs. It also does have the foot stoppers.
Materials used:
This is a DIY product, So the table tops and the storage spaces come in fiberboards — The framework comes with steel.
After doing the market research on the available products, I came up with the product inspired by various products.
Maintenance:
Checking regularly that all assembly fastenings are properly tightened and retighten when necessary.
Here are the products that I got the inspiration from.
Will the product work: Testing
As I am done with the prototyping now it is the time to do the usability testing. After gathering the users on the call, I explained.
Why did I choose this particular problem?
How I ended up with this idea.
Positive Feedbacks:
They liked the idea that more than one person can use the desk at a time.
They said it solves a lot of the issues they are facing right now.
Suggestions:
Adding mobility to the remaining desk can help more people of the family to use the desk at a time.
Having cable management groove/space in the desk would help to clear the clutter on the desk.
Iteration:
I considered integrating the cable management because most of the users work on their laptops which need frequent charging.
Future scope of the work:
Will try to improve the space management.
Can do multiple iterations based on the user’s behaviour and needs.
Major Learnings:
1. If you really want to know your users well, you need to ask questions which can make deeper sense. Asking Why is important.
2. I can’t solve the entire world’s problems.
3. To really empathize with your users, you really need to read in between the lines.
4. You can come up with any idea, no matter how crazy or weird it sounds. We never know if it works or not but don’t not kill the idea. Also, prioritizing ideas is also an important thing as we can’t address every problem the users are facing, we need to at least have an idea that solving which problems helps the most of your user.
5. Don’t think of the solutions first. If you do so, you will end up working solution backward without addressing the pain points of the users.
Thank you for reading and please provide your valuable feedback if there are any! You are awesome.
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