Watercooler: Microsoft Teams Mobile App Feature Concept
My Role: UX Researcher | Duration: 1.5Weeks | Project Status: Ongoing
Project Overview
It’s been six months since COVID 19 quarantines began in the US, and the fluctuating stay-at-home policies have rapidly increased the number of professionals working remotely.
Due to the high volume of people working from home, many online platforms have quickly adapted to their users’ needs. Microsoft Teams is one of the largest online platforms for professionals and provides work communities with the opportunity to efficiently communicate.
Teams is always seeking opportunities for growth so they looked to their UX team to define and design a new feature and ways to fulfill user needs. Their team identified the problem space and formulated a hypothesis and initial problem statement. After research and user interviews, the UX team refined their problem statement from which they conclude that Team users missed the comradery found within in-person work environments.
After several brainstorm sessions, the UX team came up with a feature called Watercooler. Watercooler takes on similar functionality to social media apps to create a fun, easygoing, safe space for workers. The team sketched out some lo-fi wireframes then ran five usability tests. The results from these tests informed the mid-fi wireframes that were also sent to five more users so that the team could understand how the design had improved and continue to improve.
The team will be creating another prototype based on the results of the last few tests and they’re looking forward to how the next round usability tests will go once users are introduced to new scenarios and revised design.
Scope of Work
The rapid incline in the number of professionals working from home has increased the amount of time users spend behind a computer screen. The new alternative to a morning meeting in the conference room has transformed into a Zoom link. We wanted to evaluate how exactly these changes have impacted remote work communities.
Process
In order to evaluate our problem space and then come up with a research-centered solution, our team references what we consider the “Double-Diamond.” The Double Diamond includes four phases; Discover, Define, Design, Deliver. Through the discovery phase, our research widens the diamond, and as we synthesize our research, we come to the completion of the first diamond into the “define” phase. The define phase flows into design through a process where we create features based on insights from our research. During the define phase, the second diamond widens as we explore several concepts, and then it begins to narrow into the “deliver” phase as we test these iterations and draw conclusions.
Problem Space Statement
Our team thought of several areas that we assumed were issues for remote workers. Those included connectivity issues, the balance between work and personal life, and organic connections with coworkers.
From there we developed the hypothesis that “remote communities need to be able to optimize their virtual tools to improve overall well-being, maintain their social and professional connections.”
We then streamlined this into an initial problem statement, “how might we optimize virtual communication tools to help remote communities improve their overall well-being, and maintain their social and professional connections?” From here, we were excited to move into the research phase.
RESEARCH PHASE (Discover + Define)
Goal of Research (What we set out to validate)
Our objective was to identify if issues with virtual tools were making it difficult for users to achieve a work/personal life balance, and maintain their mental and physical well-being.
Methodology (User Interviews — explain the method)
We recruited five users who were currently working in remote environments. We made sure that our users had diverse professional backgrounds to make our results less limited to a single industry. We conducted our user interviews over Zoom and recorded and transcribed them using Otter.
Synthesis » Affinity Mapping
After conducting our five interviews we combed through all of the data and highlighting notable quotes and keywords we found several trends. After we evaluated these trends we transformed them into insights or “I-statements” which help us determine our ideal user.
A few of our insight include:
Remote workers like to use separate online platforms and apps to communicate with friends.
Remote workers believe that in-person connections in the workplace are important and miss those interactions.
Remote workers who use Microsoft Teams find their virtual work environment more efficient.
Persona
Personas are crucial to a UX Designer in that they help us understand who we’re designing for, because if we aren’t designing the right thing then we shouldn’t even bother with designing. We use the persona as a reference point form in which all design decisions are branched.
Journey Map
The insights that we were able to pull from our interviews helped us develop Marcy. We want to place ourselves into a day in the life of Marcy to better understand how, why, and what we should design.
Marcy is a 30-year-old accountant currently living in Philadelphia. Since the COVID 19 quarantines, Marcy has been working from home. She generally wakes up in the morning and signs onto her email and her Microsoft Teams account. Marcy feels that working from home has taken away from the organic connections formed at work and has made work feel more transactional and less emotional.
Marcy feels that workplace morale has decreased since the start of COVID and this has lead to issues like delayed response times and an overall lack of energy among her peers.
Revised Problem Statement
INSIGHT: We found that while connectivity is an issue among users, it does not seem to hinder their well-being or balance between work and personal life. However, we were able to validate that users value a sense of camaraderie within the workplace.
PERSONA: We are centering our designs around remote professionals who use Microsoft Teams.
PROBLEM: Remote workers do not feel that they are fulfilling organic connections with each other in a remote work setting.
GOAL: We have an opportunity to provide users with something that will emulate water cooler chat in the virtual workplace.
RESEARCH » DESIGN
We used our insights to develop design specific solutions. We thought of our research-oriented persona, Marcy, and what she would seek in an app feature.
In-person connections are important>>Feature to simulate in-person connections.
Our users feel that Microsoft Teams is efficient>>Add a feature to the Microsoft Teams app
Separate platforms are used for social interaction >> Create an interface that resembles social apps.
DESIGN PHASE
Here it is…the app feature we’ve all been waiting for…
After we extracted design features from our insights, we questioned one insight in particular. We wondered, “why do people like to go to separate places for their social interactions?” We’re not total nerds and we get the desire for wanting to keep the workplace and social interactions separate. But we began to focus on other aspects like the interface. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built for communication purposes and we wanted to design something that would make communication between coworkers fluid and natural.
Once we narrowed down our inspiration and looked to other insights, we came up with “Watercooler”, a Microsoft Team feature influenced by social media apps to facilitate organic work connections.
Design Studio: Sketching + Concepting (Describe early ideation)
We looked to social media apps and tried to evaluate what made them easy to use but what would make them even more optimal for our persona to accomplish her goals.
After several iterations, we were able to focus on one design concept and shape a user flow.
Scenario & Task 1
Scenario
You’ve been working from home for the past several months and your company recently decided to switch to Teams. You’re on your lunch break and you want to catch up with a few of your coworkers with casual conversation and topic unrelated to work.
Task
Share with your team what you did over the weekend.
Scenario & Task 2
You’re on the Marketing Team and you all have a blast sending each other memes, sharing images, etc. In short, you’re a bunch of goofballs.
Task
Your team shares a few albums of funny content and you just took a hilarious photo of your dog, upload this image on one of your team collections.
Initial User Testing:
For the first round of usability tests, our method of recruiting was similar to our user interviews. We sought out professionals working from home. We developed a scenario and task that would allow the user to navigate and experience the app.
After observing how users completed the tasks, we evaluated several insights that informed our design for our next prototype and second round of usability tests.
Takeaways:
• Non-Team Users had a tough time navigating from their interface.
• Users did not know what the Desk feature was.
• Users felt that they should have a much easier time completing simple
tasks like uploading an image.
• The Watercooler name was more engaging than I thought.
Mid-fidelity Screens
Scenario 1
Link to Prototype
Scenario 2
Link to Prototype
User Testing: Second Round
Takeaways
• Users had a much harder time with the Watercooler name in this round.
• Many users thought they needed to have a private conversation with their
coworkers.
• Scenario 1, users got stuck at the same places.
• Scenario 2, users got stuck at a different point.
Recommendations
As we move forward into a third, higher fidelity prototype, we have several design & usability recommendations:
Design notes:
- Consider changing Watercooler to something like “water chat”
- Bring Watercooler out of the More section on Teams interface
- Lead users straight to their camera roll when uploading images
Usability Test notes:
- Create a less leading scenario in the next iteration
Next Steps
We believe that if we put ourselves on the pathway suggested below then we will be headed in the right direction to bring Watercooler from the office and into the homes of our user!
- Expand to two more personas when designing the other pages within Watercooler. When doing so ask, who else is using Teams? What would they like to see? How would they walk through the app?
- Explore other elements within the app (such as messaging, community, etc.)
- Create extensive user flows and wireframes for the rest of the pages
- Make design updates based on round 2 of usability tests.
- Test updates with a new set of users.
- Create 2 more scenarios for users to test to start understanding other aspects of the feature.
