We worked in a four-people team, and produced a concept of Wavelength, a tool to help remote workers and in-office workers communicate and connect better by providing context, helping them empathize, and giving them a sense of the whole office working as one.
Wavelength: CMU x Microsoft Design Project
Date: Jan, 2013 ~ May, 2013, 3 monthsCollaborated Project with 4 team members
School Course Project sponsored by Microsoft
My Responsibility: Facilitate design workshop/ Video Editing/ Paper prototype/ User Journal study/ Concept generating/ Data synthesis/ Visual Design/ All team involved in observation and idea generation
Discovery and Exploratory Research
Literature review/ Competitive analysis/ Focus Group Interview/ Card sorting
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We found that:
- The office environment fosters social relationships through regular interactions and sharing.
- that micro-interactions create the foundation for, and continue to build, office relationships.
- and that Physical observations provide cues to spark conversations.
Research Question
How then to bridge this gap between the in-office workers experience, and the remote-workers experience and save the viability of remote work?
Generative Research
Participatory design workshop with 9 remote workers – Story sketch/ Relationship map/ Magic device/ Confession room
We held a generative design workshop to help us fine tune our understanding of what the remote worker needs, and how we might help them get there.
What we found was that what remote workers needed:
Context
Workers want to have an understanding of what’s happening at the office – what other workers are up to, and where they fit into the picture.
Empathy
They want to be understood, and to understand better where their managers, and co-workers are coming from.
Office as One
Workers want to like they are part of one big team, regardless of their location.
Refine and Evaluative Research
Paper Prototype/ Product implementation/ Usability test/
As we moved into evaluative research – in addition to usability – we focused on finding the sweet spot on each of these critical balances.
And since gaining context, empathy and office cohesion doesn’t happen with just one click,in our generative and evaluative phase we also worked to understand where our tool fits into the workday so that it brings value and enjoyment in the short-term, while it builds towards providing critical relationship gains in the longer term.
Final Demo Video
Final Wavelength Design
We have 3 content type within Wavelength – People, News and Photos.
Content from each of the three sections will appear on the ambient display, but you can also interact with these further, and change setting for each, in the main application.
People Section
The people section utilizes data pulled from outlook and elsewhere – items like your schedule, project deadlines, and email volume and time in office compared to your average day – to determine a default approachability.
It can also be manually overridden and it will learn from your feedback.
The system also predicts how you’d like to be contacted by colleagues, based on machine learning along with some default settings, and again a manual override.
Photo Section
For the photo message content, the system will generate messages for birthdays, work anniversaries, events and project activities automatically. Our relevance algorithm ensures that photo messages highlighting those you know or may want to get to know will be prioritized.
News Reel
The news content is created by culling the top-read articles from around the office, based on news website histories. Articles can be liked, or commented on, and you can also look at what’s top read in your department.To bring the most relevant articles to the top, companies can set news-source, articles topics or keywords to filter.
Ambient Display
Content from each of the three sections will appear on the ambient display,
but you can also interact with these further, and change setting for each, in the main application.
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