OverviewSynergy is a team-building and bonding platform for professionals in remote working environments. This application allows users to discover team activities, plan events for them, and host team sessions all in one place. Our target users (team facilitators) are provided with the tools needed to help their teams learn about each other, grow together, and build bonds in virtual environments.
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Questions for Team Facilitators 💼
The overarching theme here was planning and scheduling. Participants found it difficult and time consuming to plan events virtually and struggled with aligning schedules - they usually didn't have a tool or system in place that helped with their process. Also, many didn't know what their team would enjoy doing and struggled with team attendance for events that they did plan.
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Questions for Team Members 👔
The overarching theme here was team connection/understanding and virtual interactions. Participants lacked connection and closeness with their teammates and found it difficult to understand them as there weren't many opportunities to get to know them. Some also expressed that zoom sessions were not engaging and wanted more self expression opportunities via video.
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Team Bonding vs Team Building 🫂
When pitching the general idea to create something for remote working professionals, many were unsure if we wanted to create something fun or something productive. We took 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 is designed to teach teams new skills. Team Bonding is all about having fun together and strengthening interpersonal relationships with little to no emphasis on skill development. |
Team Dynamics 🪢
We took a moment to understand some important dynamics of teamwork for the team building aspect of our platform.
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. |
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 a member who's working remotely and is interested in building bonds with coworkers.
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More in-depth with activities 🧩
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 activities. Along with this, we want to show more range of activities that could be included in our platform, to 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 would 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 with to validate our design choices and make the product better and more fit for the target audiences.
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