UC Berkeley

Maximizing Virtual Engagement in the Workplace

Timeline

Jan 2021 - May 2021

Role

Student team member

Team

Andrew Dong, Mohini Rye, Aida Raza, Chenghao Meng

Tools & Skills

Product Design, User Research, Ideation, Protoyping, Figma

Human Centered Design at UC Berkeley

During the Spring 2021 Semester, I took DES INV 15, “Design Methodology”, at UC Berkeley. This course focused on the foundational concepts of the Human-Centered Design Process. We learned about design methods associated with finding opportunity gaps, conducting user research, synthesizing, and prototyping, while also working on a team project applying these concepts.

Taking this course greatly expanded my design toolkit and reasoning for selecting design methods

Overview

As more companies migrate to a permanent work-from-home arrangement, the need to make working from home a productive work environment has never been more necessary.

Over the course of the semester, my team explored virtual engagement in the workplace to come up with our final product: OnVu: a smart IDE plugin for programmers.

The project was diving into four phases:

3. Conceptualization

4. Realiztion

  1. Identifying opportunitie

  2. User Research & Synthesis

Phase 1: Identifying Opportunities

Analyzing Factors

Social Factors

  • Isolation during the pandemic

  • Zoom fatigue

  • Home environment (background noise, etc.)

Economic Factors

  • Financial stress from the pandemic may limit end-user spending power

  • Resourceful leaders having the motivation and means to improve remote collaboration

Technological Factors

  • Experiences accessible to all types of people

  • Interaction quality may be limited by exisiting features

Finding Opportunities

We gathered an understanding of how professional committees and teams interact with one another on digital platforms by observing interactions in-class lectures and by analyzing Zoom meetings from professional development workshops and corporate meetings on YouTube.

Narrowing Down

With a better understanding of pain points and opportunities for improvement in virtual communication, we created a 2x2 matrix of our observed stakeholders and used it to generate 25 Problem Opportunity Gap (POG) statements.

After grouping similar categories, we landed on 8 POG statements. Using a weighted matrix, we decided on the statement:

How might we maximize engagement and human connection in a virtual setting?

Phase 2: User Research & Synthesis

Learning more about working from home

By collecting over 250 survey responses, conducting five 1:1 interviews, and observing a typical day of our interviewees we gained an in-depth, high-level understanding of virtual engagement in the workplace from. To reach a selected user base, we gathered data from a variety of industries and positions.

Based on our responses, we realized programming as a task correlates more strongly with virtual burnout.

Conducting user research helped us to narrow down our opportunity space to the statement below

How might we facilitate efficient exchange of project-related details among computer programmers working remotely?

Key Insights about Programmers

A unique workflow

Questions and issues are easier to address in office settings than virtually. Time and energy is wasted waiting for answers and pushing through brain blocks in the meantime.

Working overtime

Work-life balance can be thrown off if communication is lacking and project deliverables still need to be completed in a timely manner.

Not a monolith

Programmers at different experience levels or seniority will each experience burnout, but specific pain points vary, and a solution should exist to address all users' needs.

Here’s exactly who we’re focusing on

Using empathy maps of all possible user groups, our research informed us of two key personas

Celia

Age: 24

Experience: New Grad

Work from home: Yes

Pain points:

  • delayed virtual communication

  • hasn’t met coworkers since she’s virtual

  • hard to ask for help

  • time lost waiting for help

  • longer hours

Fletcher

Age: 45

Experience: Senior

Work from home: Yes

Pain points:

  • hard to get virtually caught up on new project

  • back to back zoom meetings

  • lack of natural exercise

  • dissociation from team

  • experiences burnout

What should our product look like?

By conducting a Value Opportunity Analysis (VOA) from our user research and our competitors, we reached a consensus set of guidelines that dictates our product’s attributes and sub-attributes

Must

  • Instill a high sense of security

  • Be non-intrusive and easy to integrate into routines

  • Remain relevant beyond the end of the COVID pandemic

  • Successfully alleviate virtual work burnout

Should

  • Not only be a pain remover but also a joy creator

  • Address integral issue in both virtual communication and self-management

Can

  • Help virtual work exceed physical work and create additional value and opportunities

Phase 3: Conceptualization

Generating Concepts

The team hopped on a zoom call with the goal of reaching a large amount of ideas that expand upon our individually generated ideas. We used design methods such as design heuristics and brainwriting to help us dig deeper in ideation.

Round 1

Open individual brainstorming involving minimal use of design heuristics and forced analogies by some members
Result: 50 Concepts

Round 2

Modified version of 6-3-5 brainwriting adapted for team size and virtual meeting environment, based on initial brainstorming
Result: 75 Concepts

Choosing an Idea

Round 2

Focused group discussion to:

  • Combine incomplete ideas

  • Select more prototype-able ideas

  • Eliminate ideas that already exist or aren’t useful

Result
15 Concepts

Round 1

Affinity mapping to group idea categories:

  • Office Feel

  • Well Being

  • Productivity

  • Quick Resolution

  • Shared Understanding

Result
75 Concepts

 

Round 4

Weighted matrix (Pugh Chart) to mathematically help reach final concept


Result
1 Concept

Round 3

Team-wide blind borda count voting

Result
6 Concepts

The Selected Concept

Presenting OnVu. An AI-powered IDE plug-in that detects how long someone's been working on a method and can smart make suggestions based on time elapsed. Suggestions include similar instances/methods, possible bug fixes based on previous resolutions, looping in a relevant colleague, or taking a break. What's displayed will vary with the number of suggestions elapsed and/or user-configured preferences. Unresolved issues are flagged for others to view.

Phase 4: Realization

Bringing the Concept to Life

Fast prototypes were designed in Figma of what the OnVu overlay would look like within a popular IDE among programmers, Virtual Studio Code. Below are two frames from our first round of prototyping

What do real programmers think?

To validate OnVu, we conducted concept testing interviews with our prototypes. We interviewed all types of programmers. We asked them how they would react to OnVu in specific scenarios and whether they have any feedback for improving it.

Final Demo of OnVu

After consolidating our insights from concept testing, we implemented the improvements to OnVu and presented the final demo at the end of the semester

 

Below is a use case of OnVu showcasing the initial setup upon downloading and how OnVu’s smart helper feature would function in the Menu Bar of Virtual Studio Code

Reflecting on this project

As challenging as it was to work virtually, this project was a very informative and satisyfing experience. Being able to work on an opportunity gap that is so relevant pushed me to be more creative, especially during the concept generation phase.

Each phase of the design process went smoothly, and I was especially impressed by our quality of user reseach insights in Phase 2. In Phase 3, although we successfully adapted to a virtual session of concept generation, I still felt a little longing for those in-person ideation sessions where people can get those “Aha!” moments. The longing for in-person testing and groupwork lingered on into Phase 4 where we could have possibly collected more “raw” data on our initial protoypes. If we had more time, we would definitely conduct more rounds of user testing to produce a high fidelity prototype and eventually program some features of OnVu to make testing as realistic as possible.

Having explored product design for about a year, I was very impressed with how much more I learned in this past semester. Phase 1 surprised me the most as it provided me with a framework to break down broad “how might we” statements into opportunities we can explore as designers. Overall, I am very pleased with this project experience and I cannot wait to approach new design projects with the methods I have learned in this course.