Organic Social Interactions
With the isolating side effects of remote work becoming increasingly common, our team worked with FordLabs to create an interaction solution for work & social events.
FordLabs is an innovation team that works Ford Automotive Group-affiliated businesses to champion new solutions to existing problems. With remote job opportunities becoming increasingly common, FordLabs has discovered many of their employees feel isolated from their coworkers, and seek a solution that creates organic social interactions to foster open, natural, and engaging collaboration.
I was a leading team member along with the other studio four students in this project. My contributions were as follows:
To begin our research, our team brainstormed 6 essential questions that fell under the project scope and guided our project. From these questions, our team found common themes for maintaining social interactions and the outcomes of remote work socialization, which we visualized in the Affinity Diagram below.
Our team conducted additional interviews with members of the FordLabs company, asking their current social interactions through technology as well as their pain points and desires from a reworked work-socialization solution. Following our research and interviews, our team closed our initial research phase by creating a journey map of a FordLab's employee's daily schedule, seen below.
Slack is currently how employees connect and understand company culture.
The organization of Slack workflows and channels is confusing and easy to miss.
Remote employees only meet in person once in a while and want more in-person events.
To understand our users and their opinions on virtual social interaction tools, our team conducted a design workshop to jumpstart our later ideation stages. While championing this section of the project, I chose three key activities for our workshop participants to complete: a work-day roleplay using the website Gather.town, a subsequent S.C.A.M.P.E.R. worksheet, and a final round-robin sketching activity with drawing prompts.
The Gather.town roleplay was designed to imitate a standard day in the FordLabs workplace. Participants were given in-software games to represent work time & lunch breaks as a structure to evaluate how FordLabs employees can interact from remote and at-home locations.
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Following the Gather.town roleplay was a worksheet designed to improve or evaluate the successfulness of virtual social interactions. The S.C.A.M.P.E.R. worksheet tasked participants with changing different aspects of the roleplay in order to understand their pain points and additional features that could benefit FordLabs employees.
The final workshop activity was a collection of sketching papers with prompts written above a space to sketch. Each of these prompts focused on guiding "How Might We" research questions to inspire participants to generate their own unique solutions to solving virtual social interactions at FordLabs.
The round-robin sketching activity was purposely placed last in the list of activities in order to give participants enough information and context as to how people typically interact in virtual environments.
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Participants wanted more third-party integration options, such as Slack, Zoom, or Teams.
Users suggested an office-wide "newsletter" solution to share news and start new conversations.
Users wanted more incentives for using communication tools to interact with their coworkers.
After completing the design workshop with our participants, our team created a host of concepts and sketches to preliminarily outline our design solution. With these initial solutions, we explored the usefulness of each one by testing them with our user group FordLabs employees.
One product manager at FordLabs described our solution as having "an intrinsic motive to interact," and suggested themed newsletter prompts as time goes on, allowing unique interactions between employees depending on the time of year.
One product designer at FordLabs found the idea appealing, but stated they "would use if everyone else was actively using as well," meaning that a majority of employees must also use the solution for it to have value.
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Our primary solution provides a structure for FordLabs employees to interact with their coworkers while they're away from the office.
Tying into the office newsletter in an event planner that generates event inspiration posts for easier event ideation and creation.
When an event is planned and scheduled, a notification can be sent to all RSVPs and potential employees that might like the event.
For me, one of the most important goals of working on this project was creating a realistic and feasible solution to the problem presented by FordLabs. As a third-year student in my UX course load, the quality of deliverables has grown in focus compared to past projects. Ensuring the office newsletter, event planner, and the meeting RSVPs were realistic solutions was a new challenge that I was not prepared for, but it taught me a lot about realistic expectations. If I were to to improve anything about this project, I would do the following:
I'm thankful for everyone part of FordLabs that collaborated on this project with myself and the rest of the team. A big thank you to Juliet Jimenez and Lukas Marinovic from FordLabs for their time and dedication on this project!
