Case study: Remote teams and social interactions
The process behind the creation of a tool to make remote team bonding more fun and spontaneous.
Project context
Remote work is here to stay.
The pandemic transformed the future of work and many companies are now figuring out that permanent remote work is the way going forward — in a pandemic context or not.
Despite a lot of people being very enthusiastic about remote working — some employees can feel disconnected from their teammates and that ultimately can affect their performance and collaboration in projects.
To reduce the feeling of isolation between teammates. A lot of employees started playing games and scheduled virtual social activities with their teams.
Virtual social activities are meant to be fun and make team-mates feel more connected to each other. However, I noticed that is not always how people few towards social team time.
The problem I identified
Scheduled team bonding sometimes can feel forced, boring, or taking too much time from people’s working schedules.
How can social activities be more dynamic so every team member feels engaged to participate?
My design process
I followed the stages of the Design Thinking process and the project took 10 weeks to be completed.
My Role
End-to-end project: Responsible for all phases of the project including
User research — Ideation — Prototyping — Testing — Iterating — Final product.
Research goals
To investigate how social time happens in a remote team setup.
I set up the following research goals:
- What kind of activities do teams have in a remote setup?
- How does that impact their work schedule?
- How do employees feel about accepting/declining to participate in social activities at work?
- Do introverted people react differently from extroverts?
- Do team members have a say in deciding the activities?
Assumptions and Research Goals exploration using Miro.
Research method
Desk research
- Existing articles/studies
- Competitive landscape
Primary research
- Interviews with Team leads and Team members
- Survey: (Quantitative research) via Google Forms
Total:
8 interviews with 2 user segments (team leads and team members).
73 survey responses.
Competitive Landscape
I benchmarked competitors and analyzed their strengths, business strategy and gaps. They don’t enable spontaneous fun connections but instead scheduled time for activities. Some are very focused on quizzes and scavenger hunt games while others offer virtual coffee activities and randomly pairing work colleagues for virtual conversations.
Quantitative Research
Main findings:
- 41% of activities are proposed by the team lead.
- 62% have positive feelings about playing games at work.
- 1 out of 4 employees declines participation because is outside their working hours.
Qualitative Research
Main insights the affinity mapping revealed:
- Little spontaneous conversations are the favorite social interaction between work colleagues.
- Employees prefer to decide together what social activities/team-building events they are going to have. Also, they dislike when is mandatory to participate.
- Long activities annoy people with busy schedules. Employees are likely to decline participation in virtual social events that takes longer than 45 min and are held during working hours. They don’t want social team bonding to disrupt their workload.
- In virtual activities, people prefer to gather in small groups. Specially people with introverted traits. They struggle to interact with colleagues on virtual events with a large group of people. They feel like observers more than actually interacting with the group.
Not really keen on organized fun. Is better when
you can spontaneously chat with people. — Quote from user interview.
Archetypes
The team lead
Goals: Make sure the team collaborates and keep a good team environment.
Pain points: Want the team to socialize and collaborate better but need to keep track of project progress.
Jobs to be done
I want to: Provide some space and incentives for them to feel closer to each other and improve their communication. Also, make sure they concentrate on the tasks at work and don’t spend too much time on social activities.
The timid team member
Goals: I need to feel I’m being productive and also enjoy chatting with my 2 closer colleagues so I have a mental break from work.
Pain points: When we have a virtual happy hour I don’t usually interrupt and participate. I feel I’m just watching people talk.
Jobs to be done
I want to: Have little breaks and chat with my colleagues so I can recharge and continue focusing on my daily tasks at work.
Final Hypothesis
After defining the archetypes, their needs, and pain points. I redefined the hypothesis.
We believe that enabling teams to have little social breaks throughout their working week
for remote teams
will improve their engagement in social activities, make them feel more dynamic and spontaneous.
How might we statement
I used the “How Might We” method which consists of rephrasing a challenge in a format of a question to trigger opportunities for solution exploration.
How might we enable little social breaks during the day
that allow people to recharge but don’t disrupt their workload?
Ideation
In the ideation phase, I sketched a lot with pen and paper: crazy 8’s and drafts of how the features could work and how the solution could be structured. Also, I worked on an Ideation board in Miro to put all the ideas together and filter the best ideas that would cover the user's needs and pain points.
Solution
Value proposition:
A tool to enable spontaneous fun and relaxed moments of social interaction for remote teammates.
A digital solution: Design decisions connected
with research insights
Calendar sync: Automatically find free slots for a fun time with peers. In the research findings, I saw users complain about the need of organising and scheduling time for social time.
Play mini-games and challenges: Teams do play games and they love it. Let’s keep the things that are working well.
Voice chat feature: The affinity mapping revealed a pattern regarding camera fatigue. Users have video back-to-back meetings and experience video fatigue. To avoid that, the tool’s main chat feature is through voice chat. You still can activate the camera or text chat but as a secondary functionality.
Get rewards: Employees appreciate getting recognition. Team leads have a budget set aside for entertainment and they can use it to incentive good communication among the team.
Wireframes and iterations
Usability test — 3 main changes
Usability tests are a key part of the process and I got a lot of valuable information about users' input on the digital tool. Here are the main 3 changes I made after conducting early usability tests:
Mood meter: After conducting usability tests on the low-fi prototype I made this feature more prominent. Users found that interesting as it allowed them to see how their colleagues are feeling. Also, added a tip functionality that recommends an activity according to the user’s mood.
Calendar sync: Added Calendar sync options. Users wanted to be able to select the days they are available to have social interactions with colleagues.
Leaderboard: The first prototype had a Leaderboard table where users could see their colleagues’ points. I removed that after getting feedback that this feature could create conflict as teammates can get uncomfortable if others are playing more than they should and are compromising work productivity.
Final branding and art direction
The naming of the tool is “Togi” and reminds the word “together”.
The concepts for the branding are: fun, vibrant, and quirky. Togi brings some spontaneous colorful bright moments of fun and social interactions for work colleagues. The colors inspire a mood of warmth and vibrant energy.
Moodboard
Inspiration from other designers/artists*
I created a mood board with inspiration from other artists and designers with the concepts of “vibrant” and “office nostalgia”. “Office nostalgia” because research revealed users missed some aspects of the physical office spaces like casual encounters and conversations around the watercooler and kitchen area. To bring back the “office space nostalgia” I created illustrations using the technique of “collage” with old pictures from between 1950 and 1980 which is when a lot of office spaces boomed in capitals around the globe.
Bespoke illustrations for Togi’s branding and UI
Happy path
Final prototype
Thanks for reading :)
Questions, comments, and feedback are welcome!
Get in touch: ligiaolmos@hotmail.com
