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OverviewSynergy is a remote team-building and bonding platform for professionals. This application allows users to discover activities, plan events, and host team building and bonding sessions all in one place. Team facilitators, our target users, are provided with the tools needed to help their teams to learn and grow while building bonds. The virtual sessions offer multiple ways to interact with members during sessions while preserving and closely mimicking real-life interactions.
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Design Process:
Define
What problem are we trying to solve?
The Problem
For my team's capstone project, we had full freedom to choose any realm to focus on and produce a product for. With the Corona virus and many companies switching to completely remote work environments, many were still adjusting to the dynamics of working remotely. We decided to design for the professional and remote working world where we saw lots of areas for growth and room for improvement.
The initial conversations we had with people at this stage were very low level to simply identify a potential problem space better. Below, I show some of the questions we asked people around us that helped us define a problem space.
Through these conversations with professional working adults, we noticed that a huge recurring theme was that people felt it was harder to connect with their colleagues digitally, and usually didn't have anything set in place in their current companies that helped with these struggles or worked to combat them. With this, we also came to understand that there are usually two kinds of people that would be involved with such dynamics - team managers/team facilitators or anyone involved in virtual team dynamics, and normal employees that participate in such dynamics.
The initial conversations we had with people at this stage were very low level to simply identify a potential problem space better. Below, I show some of the questions we asked people around us that helped us define a problem space.
- What are some things you've struggled with in the professional remote space?
- What currently exists in your company to help combat some of these struggles that you've faced in remote spaces?
- What's missing that would help in remote professional working spaces?
- What are some of your personal interests that could be translated into something incorporated into a professional event?
Through these conversations with professional working adults, we noticed that a huge recurring theme was that people felt it was harder to connect with their colleagues digitally, and usually didn't have anything set in place in their current companies that helped with these struggles or worked to combat them. With this, we also came to understand that there are usually two kinds of people that would be involved with such dynamics - team managers/team facilitators or anyone involved in virtual team dynamics, and normal employees that participate in such dynamics.
Research
What's important for us to understand before building a product?
User Interviews
Our team had more formal conversations with our targeted audiences identified in previous stages to better understand the initial struggles we identified. We interviewed a total of five people to capture their experiences.
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Questions we asked managers 💼
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Questions we asked employees 👔
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Through these interviews, we found that overall many people mentioned a desire for an application where they can express themselves, the possibilities of interacting almost as if they were in person, and pain points revolving around the virtual meeting realm and also within team bonding and building specifically in expressing lack of connection, closeness and understanding to/of their colleagues.
Survey
We put out a survey and asked for responses from professionals in remote working environments. The questions we asked here were very similar to those we asked in interviews, and were used to further understand the audience's desires and struggles past our immediate connections.
From six total responses, we learned the following:
- People were usually motivated to bond and build with their team for more effective teamwork and collaboration and building rapport with their colleagues
- Aligning schedules and finding availability was a struggle for most people on both sides
- Creating connections virtually is difficult, it's harder to get people engaged and to stay engaged
- People desire for team bonding and building to be fun, engaging, with high attendance from their teammates.
- For all, effective team collaboration was important in the work that they did for a living.
Secondary Research
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Team Bonding vs Team Building 🫂
When pitching the general idea that we wanted to create something for remote working professionals, many were unsure if we wanted to create something fun or something productive. We made sure to take a step back as a team and identify that we were trying to do both, which became easier to express once we understood the differentiation ourselves.
Team Building activities are designed to teach your team new skills, while Team Bonding is all about having fun together and strengthening interpersonal relationships. The primary objective here is fun, with little to no emphasis on skill development. With this understanding, we included these definitions into our initial product proposal as many people (including ourselves) oftentimes combined the two together which created confusion. We wanted to be inclusive of skill building activities and fun, bonding activities. |
Team Dynamics 🪢
We took a moment to understand some important dynamics of teamwork for the team building aspect of our platform.
One thing we learned about is Tuckman's four stages of group development - forming, storming, norming, and performing. Understanding this model helped us understand in which ways we could help teams become more effective, which would be through activities that might help in all of these stages revolving around things like communication and collaboration. I specifically did some research on some characteristics of ineffective vs effective teams. Some characteristics of effective teams were supportive and collaborative relationships, solution-oriented decisions, participative atmospheres, and chances for achievement as a group. Some characteristics of ineffective teams were relationships based on need or liking, motivation based on coercion and pressure, and creativity controlled by power and not solutions. |
Audience
Based on our reseach, how can we define our audiences?
We identified these top audiences based on the different people we interviewed for responses and the people that filled out our survey. In both, we ensured to always ask for their roles in their company. Roles ranged from Senior Executives, Managers, Team Facilitators, and other ranges of employees not in management or director roles. So, our top two are those that might be involved in team dynamics (managers, etc) and then everyone else who is on a team and can benefit from such positive dynamics.
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Primary Persona 👩🏼💼
Our primary persona represents an HR Manager who values solid team connections for great project outcomes.
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Secondary Persona 🧑🏼💼
Our second persona represents an employee who's working remotely and is interested in building bonds with coworkers.
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Ideate
Sharing the same vision of our platform and defining direction
Our process of ideating our site features began with mindmapping and brainstorming some potential concepts that could address our user’s needs. We then combined all of our individual ideas that we thought were really compelling and we organized them through a card sorting activity.
Mind Mapping 🗺️
I created this mind map to show my ideas and vision for this platform at a high level. In the end, all of our mind maps were very similar and demonstrated how we might show both the team bonding and team building aspects of our platform.
Card Sorting 🃏
In our team's card sorting activity, we identified different features we might want in our product and some of the different parts of those features to help organize our ideas and identify areas for opportunity within those areas. For example, shown below are some of our ideas for the planning/scheduling, and video session features. At this point, along with team bonding and building activities, we wanted to also provide a hosting space to address some of the other concerns we had around it being harder to connect and get people engaged.
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Design
Brining our ideas and product to life with low and high fidelity prototypes
Sketches
When it came to visuals, we weren’t able to communicate many of our ideas effectively through words alone, and this made it difficult to align our overall vision for our product. To compensate for this, we decided that we would each create low-fidelity sketches of wireframes that demonstrated some of our individual ideas for the site’s layout and flow. This helped us tremendously with explaining our concepts, choosing the most effective routes, deciding which core interactions that we wanted to focus on.
Below are some of our individual sketches that our team members made for the same page, the plan event page. Each of us visually had a different idea for what this page would look like as well as its contents. After creating these sketches, our team was finally able to reach a consensus of what would be included in this plan event page. We ended up using the most helpful features from our sketches for the last iteration of our prototype, such as the ability the view your team’s availability, add multiple activities to a single event, and edit team details and invitations.
Below are some of our individual sketches that our team members made for the same page, the plan event page. Each of us visually had a different idea for what this page would look like as well as its contents. After creating these sketches, our team was finally able to reach a consensus of what would be included in this plan event page. We ended up using the most helpful features from our sketches for the last iteration of our prototype, such as the ability the view your team’s availability, add multiple activities to a single event, and edit team details and invitations.
Sketches by Jheron, which encompassed many our ideas the best
Wireframes
Once aligned, our interface designers (myself and Jheron) started putting together more official wireframes before transitioning into high fidelity designs. Below, you can see where a lot of our screens started.
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Validation
After the last stage, we then created a higher fidelity prototype to conduct some usability testing. From these tests, we wanted to understand how people were interacting with our product and if people enjoyed the concept in general. This test was task-oriented and we asked participants to do things like 'plan a new event' or 'browse new activities'. After these tasks, we asked some questions to better understand their experiences. Due to covid restrictions, we ran remote tests and tested five people total.
Here are some of the responses:
Our final design shown below incorporated many of these changes. Due to time, some of them were not implemented but we have intention in further testing and changing more to fit our responses!
Here are some of the responses:
- Product Previews - There are no reviews on how the application is used, would be helpful
- More features of facilitators - More features like to do lists, upcoming tasks, and notes for planning would be useful
- Activity Tags - On the discover page, include tags/keywords for easy identifying and categorization of those teaching for the perfect activities
- Activity Information - Some important information is missing like shipping details and drink types (Mixology event)
- Invite Previews - It's not super clear that these are just previews of an email to be sent and not a part of the current page they're viewing. Also, questions on how this might function in the platform
- Logo - Brand Logo blended in too much, too light and not very noticeable
- Navigation - The navigation on the top and to the left had some repeated options, was confusing
Our final design shown below incorporated many of these changes. Due to time, some of them were not implemented but we have intention in further testing and changing more to fit our responses!
Design
Synergy
Team Building & Bonding Website
Below, I have a video demonstration of the final high fidelity prototype that my team used for our final capstone presentation. This prototype was created by me and my teammate, Jheron.
Satisfaction & Feedback
We ultimately got very good feedback on our project! Many could relate to the struggles of working remotely and trying to connect in such environments over video, and were also intrigued by the different fun activities that were demonstrated in our prototype. Everyone wanted to join in on the Mixology Event! Those who have been responsible for team dynamics in the past also expressed great interest in the idea that this is a one stop shop to bring their teams together, noting that this would make their process in their roles much more manageable and enjoyable.
Here's some questions and feedback we got during our capstone presentation. We hope to look into these concerns and implement changes in future iterations!
Here's some questions and feedback we got during our capstone presentation. We hope to look into these concerns and implement changes in future iterations!
- Are the colors of the logo ADA compliant?
- Could this application also be inclusive of in-person events too?
- What's the benefit of using this scheduling tool over one already integrated into many companies (ie. Microsoft teams)?
- In what ways can we account for some of the issues around struggling virtual connections and expression in live sessions?
- How feasible is having it to actually have this be a one-stop-shop for activities, planning, and hosting?
Backlog
There are plenty of things we wanted to incorporate into this product and experience! Given our short period of time and other constraints, we added some things to the backlog for now.
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More in-depth with activities 🧩
Due to time constraints, our team was only able to demonstrate a few team bonding and building activities as previews in our final product (mixology class, blind drawing, and escape room previews). In the future, we'd love to finish designing out the entirety of these virtual activities so one could see what it's like to go through one end to end. Along with this, we would want to show more range of activities that could be included in our platform, as it would show the different types of experiences we have to offer and allow us to make a more fully functional prototype.
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Larger Sample Sizes 📝
Our team could benefit from gathering research from a larger pool of people. We were working with limited time and resources, so we interviewed and gathered as much information that we could do ourselves with the people that we had access to. In the future, we hope to get more people to interview and test our product to validate our design choices and make the product better and more fit for the target audiences.
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Reflection
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges we faced here was the difference in our thoughts, ideas, and opinions within the people on our team. This is to be expected in any design project, especially in newly formed teams. Though, oftentimes our team struggled with communication and effective collaboration. We wanted to make sure everyone's ideas were heard and hopefully incorporated somehow, while at the same time maintaining our focus on the goal and needs of the project itself regardless of personal wins or losses.
It's ironic actually, midst this we were designing an entire application that can help teams get through issues just like this through team building exercises and we actually did some of those activities ourselves! This was a really essential piece in our process because it not only allowed us to empathize directly with the issues and concerns of our target audiences, but made way for a product we were all proud of when we put the importance of staying on the same page at the forefront.
It's ironic actually, midst this we were designing an entire application that can help teams get through issues just like this through team building exercises and we actually did some of those activities ourselves! This was a really essential piece in our process because it not only allowed us to empathize directly with the issues and concerns of our target audiences, but made way for a product we were all proud of when we put the importance of staying on the same page at the forefront.
Takeaways
My biggest takeaway from this experience was how much more thorough design can be with more time! Before this project, the longest project I had worked on was about 2-3 months since I was working on projects that ended when my quarter at school ended. This project spanned across two quarters instead of one, and I realized how much more thorough we could be in our process and decisions. 5 months still isn't the most time in the world, but it made much more room for recognizing holes in design processes and not being afraid to point them out because of extremely limited time.