THINKING ABOUT REMOTE WORK
According to data released by INE, the number of teleworkers in Portugal grew 23.1% in the second quarter of this year. And the pandemic was the main reason for this increase. With this new scenario, we need to better understand one of the greatest modern challenges.
“How Might We help people and/or companies to shift to remote and build a healthy and productive routine around it?”
SURVEY
Desktop research was carried out to provide reference to the trends in the area of interest, in addition to inputs of analogous themes that can assist in understanding the subject worked. After that was constructed a survey wich was answered by 23 people.
Most people have a space reserved for work at home (78.9%), they take regular breaks during working hours (Image 1) and have the felling that it is easy do they to manage your time when working from home.
The interesting thing was that 66.7% of people do not have a proper rest experience, because they have fear of being behind in work (Image 2). It is importante to think what it is happening because This behavior has the potential to negatively influence a team’s stress levels.
BHARATHI, T.; GUPTA, K. S. (2017) suggest that higher employee productivity is associated with better psychological well-being, greater perceived commitment from the organization and greater access to resources and information. The research supports relationship between well-being and productivity, commitment and productivity.
AFFINITY MAP
After analyzing the results of the survey and semi-structured interviews, we wrote down some insights to understand the goal more deeply. Thus, the research showed the need to redo the “How might we” question.
“How might we reduce the negative effects of isolation on feeling behind in work?”
We believe reducing isolation for remote workers during work hours will achieve better health scores & higher engagement with colleagues. We will know we are right when the people are reporting low stress levels, are taking breaks and engage regularly with their colleagues.
EMPATHY MAP AND PERSONAS
To gain a deeper insights about the customer was scope a Empathy Map wich gave us another perspective that how to think what do they see or hear. Some of those people would like to see the people better then a screen (3d perspective), see the each other progress in a work and would like to feel more connected with your colleagues. To keep the design centered on users at every step of the process, we use persona tool (Image 3). Beside we taked different pain points from this for think about the design solution.
SKETCHING
After brainstorming was decided to do a plataform to combine some features like work progress with the social aspects in a balanced way.
CONCEPT TESTING
RAPID PROTOTYPING
After adjusting the sketches the first rapid prototype was maded to test.
THE PLATAFORM
It is interesting to think about the feeling of pressure and anxiety on the one side and the appeal to participate and feel included in social activities on the other side. These are the core issues in our scenario and basic reactions that drive human behaviour. As a group we realised that progress bar may even worsen the feeling of pressure and falling behind, so that it is something that need to test more.
NEXT STEPS
For see how it looks, I made a quick sketch in Figma of one possible version that could serve for further testing. This version incorporates some of the feedback we gained from testing as well.
After this stage we could go into more refined testing, and start designing some visual part. It was a great exercise to understand better how to do surveys and interviews, and how testind it is important for a better platforms human centered
