BetterSpace
Improving social connection in a time of remote working.
3 week sprint - Client Brief - Team of 4
Overview
Client & Brief
BetterSpace is a wellbeing benefit platform and marketplace for corporate environments. From apps to videos, yoga to pottery, they curate a range of resources for employees to use as a unique and holistic approach to wellbeing.
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BetterSpace encourage users to rate different areas of their wellbeing as part of their onboarding process, then saves these ‘scores’ on their homepage, to be updated at any point. Where the user rates one area of wellbeing low eg. sleep, they can shop the discover page for resources that may help improve their sleep.
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In their brief, BetterSpace highlighted a central problem of their current app, they stated:
“Our product preaches Social Connections as one of the most important ways to promote wellbeing, but we don’t do enough. Ideally, our service should make it easy for people to connect.”
They asked us to create a new feature/s for managers to facilitate social connection for their teams and staff and also evaluate and suggest changes to the overall journey from homepage to choosing wellbeing resources.
My Role
I worked as part of a team of 4 to deliver this project. We were each were responsible for all elements of the UX process, including comparative and competitive research, interviews, ideation, sketching, designing and iterating based on usability testing, developing high fidelity prototype and final design.
Process & Insights
Discover
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Competitor analysis of similar wellbeing apps highlighted opportunities to improve connection between colleagues through team events and personal profiles.
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Our screener survey of 114 people showed 65% of people found social connection at work 'extremely important'. We interviewed 12 people who gave the following insights:
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People miss smaller workplace interactions and want to connect on a smaller scale.
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People feel more isolated working from home and may be less likely to ask for help remotely.
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People are open to new events and social connection in teams but also have zoom fatigue.
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Conducted 5 usability tests of the existing app to identify areas to improve.
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Define
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​​Created a user journey map to illustrate where user frustrations arise when using the current app, informed by usability testing.
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Main frustrations were around filtering resources and not being able to share resources with colleagues.
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Created a persona encapsulating our average user 'Lily', she is new to a job and wants to connect more with her colleagues. She represents the user needs and frustrations made clear from our research.
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Using this research we could define Lily's problem:
“Lily needs more social connection at work because she feels lonely working from home and it is impacting her wellbeing.”
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This research enabled us to think of more ways we could help Lily and explore areas to improve on the app. As we approached design studios and sketches, we considered the following thoughts:​
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How might we make the platform more dynamic to use?
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How might we personalise the experience?
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How might we connect colleagues in a meaningful way?
Develop
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Facilitated a design studio with BetterSpace employees to sketch out ideas for social connection on the app, keeping previous research insights in mind.
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Took insights from design studio and research to form a personal profile on the app called 'My Wellbeing' which features as a hub for colleague connections and work social events.
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Implemented new filtering for wellbeing resources and ability to share resources in the app or outside it.
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Tested with 8 users at each stage of development, from sketch to low and mid fidelity.
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Iterated on designs in response to usability testing. This included changing the placement of the 'wellbeing pillars', and changing the language around certain gestures we had introduced to promote connections between colleagues.
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Delivered a proposed solution in the form of a high-fidelity prototype.
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Deliver - The Outcome
Design Iterations
An example of the feedback we encountered whilst testing the app, and how we changed design elements in response to user testing.
Selection of pages added to improve social connection
Pages edited from the current app in response to usability testing
The Solution
Every design decision was directly related to the original problem of needing to improve social connection between colleagues, and further informed by interview insights and user testing. The final proposed design includes:
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Homepage redesign: Refined copy, new interaction with key wellbeing pillars, carousel of resources for easier browsing, view of events and opportunity to learn more about each pillar.
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Discovery page: New filter and sort by options.
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Share button on resources: opportunity to share resources with team, individual colleague or outside the app on Whatsapp etc.
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My Wellbeing page: featuring my events, connections, favourites, orders and wellbeing pillars.
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Events page: featuring team and personal events, fresh remote event ideas to tackle zoom fatigue.
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Connections page: featuring teams, clubs and friends.
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Team page: which features newsfeed for employee interaction, a team calendar, team organigram and external colleague profile with the opportunity to send coffee or other gestures.
The Prototype
Conclusion
Key learnings
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Usability testing is crucial. We had so many moments where users unlocked new ways of thinking or helped us develop the language or structure of certain pages through their comments when testing.
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I enjoy leading and project planning. We shared tasks in the group equally but in the moments where I led the group I really enjoyed trying to encourage team mates and directing the path of research and design.
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Human problems are always engaging. Working with such widespread and pressing problem of social isolation was incredibly engaging as a designer as I was really driven to empathise with our interviewees and testers in a bid to solve this emotive and impactful issue.
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Next Steps
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Further usability testing of the prototype
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Test other variations of the features; for instance, separating the My Wellbeing page into the navigation to have My Connections on the navigation bar.
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Question whether the user would want to see notifications? As notifications is known to cause a feeling of anxiety
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Gamification - How and where this could be used? Potentially setting challenges to do with co-workers?
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Layout and testing of the desktop version
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Manager metrics - we didn’t have enough access to managers to make big changes in this area but would investigate this further if we could get access to more current users.
Client feedback
10 employees from BetterSpace came to the final presentation, during which they very encouragingly wrote the following messages on our Zoom chat.
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