WORK FROM HOME - BUDDY
UI UX Designer & Researcher
Overview
Due to the sudden increase in Work-from-home (WFH), businesses and their employees have had to quickly change work-related procedures and practices with a significant emphasis on technology. This project investigates a technological solution for employees working from home to reduce video conferencing fatigue, improve togetherness, and enhance well-being.
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Tools
Figma
UX Tweak
Optimal Workshop
Google Forms
Miro
Google Scholar
Microsoft Teams
Team
I was solely responsible for the end to end UX research and design phase. I planned, strategized and implemented the solution within given time period.
Timeline
Duration - 5 months​
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Research Execution & Results
In Depth Interview
A sample size of five participants was recruited through social media like LinkedIn, Facebook. They were then invited for online interviews via Teams meeting. The data collected from the study was categorized in the form of user needs, their pain points, current strategies to deal with the problem, and technological problems related to VC software. The data was recorded, and notes were taken at the interview process.
Meet Miles
A consolidated persona has been established to demonstrate users' suffering while working remotely. The exhaustion faced by video conferencing software impacts mental health, productivity, and performance.
User Journey Map
Employee Journey on a typica day of Work From Home
WHO
Problem Statement
WHAT
Miles, a 35-year-old project manager wants to have to reduce the effect of video conferencing while working at home as he feels fatigued, stressed, and disconnected
WHERE
WHY
Solution
To improve the entire experience and welfare of employees working remotely, I proposed a solution of an integrated web application by using features from the Microsoft Team's developer toolkit, such as Personal Apps, Tabs, etc. It is hosted on any cloud platform like Azure or AWS and should be integrated with M.S. teams using the Personal Apps and Tabs feature provided by the video conferencing software. This will enable staff members to connect with peers, measure their moods, and receive recommendations based on those findings, all of which help to reduce weariness.
Technical Implementation for distinct screens :
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​Organizational Norms / Guidelines - The Microsoft Teams design and development toolkit will be used to build this webpage. The guidelines and norms will then be retrieved from the organization's database using their APIs.
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Connect with peers – The content of this webpage will also be built using the M.S. Teams design and development toolkit, which will use the organization's and user's data from M.S. Teams to display relevant data to the logged-in user. To book a time slot in the calendar for the host/joined event, it will also use the M.S. Outlook API.
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Health & Tips – According to the tracked mood, it can be a separately running/hosted webpage, which can be embedded as external content into M.S. Teams Tabs.
Sketching Solutions
The Crazy 8 method in the ideation phase to get ideas flowing for the design problems I encountered through our How Might We statements which this project needs to solve.
Idea Evaluation Matrix
I ranked potential features based on two main things: how much they would help users (Impact) and how hard they would be to put into action (Efforts). Different users have different needs, so some features might be more important to them than others. Also, the more complicated a feature is to create, the more time, energy, and resources it will take.
Lo-Fi Designs
Hi Fi Designs
Organizational Norms / Guidelines Page
Connect with Peers Page
Health and Tips Page
How to integrate with Microsoft Teams ?
Microsoft Teams has provided a feature to add your ideas to applications. These applications can be of vivid types as apps provided by M.S. Teams, by external services such as tabs, bots, message extensions, or their combination, thus expanding the value of M.S. Teams. The videoconferencing software provides a personal app that enables one-on-one communication and a shared feature that can be used as a collaborative platform. M.S. Teams has provided a Teams developer platform to build apps to fit user requirements. A new or existing application can be created and merged by the user.
From the build environment options, you can choose from the road map to build and deploy a Teams app.
Steps to crate a web application
A web application developed using any web technologies like React, Angular, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Usability Testing
The remote test was setup with instructions on UX tweak. he study included a pre-test survey followed by 4 tasks on an interactive prototype, and a post-test survey.The post-study questionnaire was taken reference from the Standford University Research Paper to calculate the Zoom Exhaustion Scale
KPI's
Behavioural KPI
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Task Success Rate​
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Time on Task
Attitudinal UX KPI
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System Usability Scale (SUS)
Task number vs Success Rate
Task Number vs Average Time Taken
Post study survey results
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Over 90% of participants reported that it was simple to comprehend the core objective of the application, with 60% giving it a rating of 5 and the remaining 40% giving it a rating of 4.
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About 60% of participants reported feeling emotionally and cognitively exhausted and dreading having to perform things after participating in video conferencing.
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About 80% of participants said working from home makes them feel disconnected from their coworkers, and they seek a platform where they may participate in and host social activities and events to socialize with other colleagues
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Over ninety percent of users indicated a positive overall experience with the application and gave a rating of 4.2 out of 5.
Key Takeaways
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Doing Remote Testing was helpful since the application is designed for WFH employees hence employees were able to connect and provide real feedback.
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Microsoft Teams provides one of the easiest ways to integrate your existing web apps with Teams through “tabs".
If I had more time, I would have ...
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A video tutorial to guide the application keeping in mind the hekp and documentation Law from Heuiristics
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A feature to remind the time to book for yourself
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Provision to book productive hours for employees.
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To Add Voice assistance in the application to add an accessibilty feature.
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