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FordLabs x PUXD

Facilitating social interactions

FordLabs was seeking a solution that enables their employees to have more organic social interactions. Our team of six worked with FordLabs throughout the Fall 2023 semester to develop a solution to their problem.

My Contributions

A large amount of my responsibilities revolved around research. Towards the beginning of the project, I helped with secondary research behind the problem and with our team's competitive analysis. I also conducted some primary research by interviewing one of the employees at FordLabs. Later in the semester, I reached back out to my interviewee and did some concept testing with them. I helped document my research findings and other parts of our design process.

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Meet the Team

Teammates

  • Justin Lee

  • Mikaela Thompson

  • Sofia Hutchison

  • Brandon Wong

  • Caroline Risewick

Sponsors​

  • Juliet Jimenez

  • Lukas Marinovic

Research

Initial Research

To gain an understanding of what causes people to interact naturally and how it can be replicated online, the team explored some articles that dove into how companies are connecting with remote workers and how employees connect with each other. Our insights from the secondary research provided us with a base understanding of the issue and informed some of our next research steps. One of the research steps that our secondary research informed was our competitive analysis, where each team member explored a tool that companies used for remote social interaction and observed how features within each tool facilitated online interactions. Our secondary research findings gave us qualities to look for in these features we were studying. 

Takeaways

  • Maintaining a casual, fun work environment where there are daily opportunities to connect online is key to generating interactions between employees.

  • Hosting fun events outside of work can foster more organic interactions

  • Having clearly defined roles within teams and clearly communicating event details is important

  • Reaching out to and checking on coworkers mental health can increase trust between each other

Interviews with FordLabs Employees

After our initial research, our team still needed to understand more about the company culture of FordLabs and how the employees interact with each other throughout the day. We also wanted to know what tools they were currently using and how those are used to connect remote workers with each other. In order to accomplish this goal, we conducted interviews with five FordLabs employees.

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Collection of key findings from our interviews

Summarized Insights

  • Virtual work allows for flexibility in their schedule

  • Employees prefer knowing the current status of their coworkers, which Slack allows them to do

  • The work environment is casual and laid back

  • Workers expressed a need for more organized, in-person events to connect more with the company culture

Journey Map

We used the findings from our interviews with FordLabs employees to create a journey map of their workday. In creating this journey map, we highlighted parts of the work day where the employee may feel that virtual work is convenient for them and other parts of the day where they may feel disconnected from others due to working remotely. Finding these pain points in the schedule provided us with a valuable reference to the specific issues we are looking to solve for the employees.

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Ideation

Design Workshop

Our team wanted to learn about how people interact in a virtual work environment, so we set up a workshop that consisted of our team, some other UX designers, and a few non-UX design majors to understand their thoughts while using virtual interaction tools. After simulating a work day in Gather, we participated in some sketching activities to help generate ideas that would improve social interactions.

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S.C.A.M.P.E.R. activity where we came up with ideas to modify Gather to efficiently foster social interactions

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Sketching activity where we sketched ideas based on the prompt our team made and built off of each others suggestions.

Workshop Takeaways

  • Participants wanted more ways to share personal news with each other

  • Generated idea of an office newsletter

    • Foster direct communication between workers​

    • Envisioned to announce personal achievements, news, events, and important information to initiate new conversations

Sketches

Each member of the team sketched out ideas for a way to facilitate virtual interactions. After reviewing each other's ideas, we centered our focus on three ideas: an office newsletter, Pinterest-style event planner, and a notification inspired by raid events in video games.

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Office Newsletter sketch

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Event Planner Sketch

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Notification sketch

Concept Testing

Our team conducted concept tests with two different groups. The first group was the Key Lime Interactive experience studio team because they had a very similar problem space. We showed them our sketches and asked for their thoughts to receive some outside perspectives on our design. Next, we reached out to a couple of our interviewees from FordLabs to understand how well our ideas would fit into the company's environment and culture. The insights from the concept testing validated some of our design decisions and offered suggestions that would improve our ideas even more.

Takeaways

  • Office Newsletter was the most favored design

    • Providing guidance through prompts where users share news would increase motivation to participate​

  • The notification would work better for remote events. Including a do not disturb option would benefit those who are busy and do not want to be distracted.

  • Event planner would work better for formally planned events. Allowing others to collaborate on an event would be convenient.

Final Design

Our primary solution is an office newsletter that allows employees to share things that happen in their life outside of work, share virtual or in-person events with other workers, and respond to interaction prompts to start some conversations. This newsletter would be integrated into Slack because the workers at FordLabs are already familiar with the software. The prompts that employees would respond too would be generated by AI because it is less stressful and more convenient than coming up with prompts on their own. Users can respond and react to other posts, which could spur some more organic interactions between FordLabs employees.

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Office Newsletter prompt screen

We included our event planner idea within the newsletter so FordLabs employees can share events with others or create events of their own. We added a feature that allows the creator to add collaborators who can edit the event to foster more conversations between users. According to our interviews, FordLabs employees would feel motivated to engage with an event if they know all of the essential details, so he user is asked to fill in details of the event, including the date, time, location, cost, etc. 

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Event Planner details and settings screen

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