A UX Case Study — BetterSpace client project
From apps to videos, yoga to pottery, BetterSpace curate a range of resources for employees to use as a unique and holistic approach to wellbeing.
Background
Lack of belonging was a problem even before the pandemic forced employees out of the office.
In 2019, 40% of people reported feeling isolated at work.
Now there is an even more urgent need to address the isolation from peers and colleagues. It existed before, it will exist after, so this is a big emotional and social problem to tackle.
A Summary of the Brief
- Create feature/s for managers to facilitate social connection for their teams and staff.
- Support regarding what metrics managers can use to view and measure their team wellbeing.
- Suggested UX improvements across the journey of the website homepage right to the journey of employees/employers signing up to take part in activities.
In the time we had, the top point became our priority and the focus of most of our research along some other UX improvements.
The Team
Alongside myself was Robyn Bellamy, Catherine Allen and Charlie Bullman. We had a very communicative and energetic method of working which made the 3 weeks a very enjoyable sprint.
My role
As a group we all took on multiple elements of the double diamond process shown below. My responsibilities included competitive research, user interviews, facilitation of the design studio, low fidelity sketching, medium fidelity wireframes, high fidelity component making, usability testing and final presentation and positive energy.
The Double Diamond Process
1. Discover
Competitor analysis, usability testing of the current platform & 12 interviews
Analysing the competition
As a team we did a feature analysis with multiple competitors and highlighted where there were clear gaps in the market and opportunities to improve social connections which are shown below.
Opportunities arose to:
- Connect teams
- Attend events/ activities between colleagues
- Introduce calendar/ reminders for social events
- Create a personal employee profile
What do people miss the most since working remotely?
After 12 interviews, 8 of which were non BetterSpace users and 4 of which were new adopters of the app, we found that people really miss the smaller workplace interactions and people want to connect on a smaller scale.
Further findings from interviews:
- 65% of our (104) survey responders said social connection was ‘extremely important’
- People were open to new events and connection across teams, but we also needed to be conscious of the zoom fatigue that people are experiencing. Activities need to be kept fresh, easy and exciting.
- Interviewees were less likely to ask for help when working from home as it may be harder to tell what the workload of others is.
2. Define
Take a look at the current user journey that Lily is experiencing prior to any of the design amendments. This was generated after usability testing the current platform with users. The biggest pain point shows the inability to connect and share resources with other colleagues.
Who is experiencing these problems?
Lily was who we referred to for the rest of our project as a user generated from an amalgamation of all of the different view points we collected. This made it easier to talk about the users journey as it is one person representing all of our insights.
Lily’s persona emphasises the problem stated below, which is a problem that a lot of us have experienced in the last year —
We then thought about how we might help Lily with the problem by writing some how might we statements
We really focused on the last HMW statement, and the other HMW statements were kept in mind throughout the rest of the project to help inform design decisions throughout our iterations of our prototype.
3. Develop
Design studio & prototyping
Design Studio
With the main how might we statement in mind and following our design studio with over 10 stakeholders at BetterSpace, we received the following ideas and implemented them into our initial sketches:
News Feed
Sending gifts & affirmations to colleagues
Sharing resources and events
Profile/ Team/ Connection pages
New features through sketching and iterations
We eventually settled on this flow following multiple rounds of sketching with the insights gathered from the design studio.
The Wellbeing page
- For people to connect it was necessary to develop a profile page. This resulted in a ‘Your wellbeing’ page. This is a place to access and create events and to view connections and a newsfeed with colleagues.
- We altered the information architecture and included ‘favourites’ and ‘orders’ within the Wellbeing page.
The Connection Page
- A key feature within the Wellbeing page is the connection page, which allows Lily to interact with her team. Within the connection page is a newsfeed displaying the activity within the team.
- In order to try and re-create the small interactions that Lily misses in the work place, we created an external profile page for colleagues where they are able to send small gestures of good will. This was a solution to the main problem that individuals are experiencing whilst working from home — the lack of smaller ‘water-cooler moments’ in the workplace.
- The gestures were developed with usability testing, whilst people questioned the meaning and language used for the gestures.
- Most users greatly appreciated this new feature with one Accenture user saying:
“These interactions are a nice touch — sending a coffee is like sending a hug, and informal way of connecting when we’re limited virtually.”
The Share function
- If we refer back to the How Might We (HMW) statement ‘HMW make this platform more dynamic’ along with ‘HMW connect colleagues in a more meaningful way’, our insights informed that a simple way to improve social connections would be to share resources on the app with colleagues and recommend resources users have enjoyed.
- Users found this an easy function to use as it is a recognisable sharing feature from various other applications.
4. Deliver
Following usability testing of the Lo-fi prototypes, our insights informed our next design decisions into our hi-fidelity prototype. I have highlighted the reasons for our decisions below.
Home page
- Horizontal scrolling was implicated in order to allow more content on the page and less endless scrolling.
Search function
- We implemented a search function whilst altering the information architecture on the navigation as during one of our usability tests an interviewee mentioned ‘ what if I have anxiety and want to search for resources quickly rather than having to scroll through the different pillars’. This search function could also be used to search for colleagues or potential clubs to join.
Update Pillars
- From both BetterSpace users and first time users, feedback was that they would rather not see the pillars every time they opened the app along with the word ‘score’. The pillars turned into a clickable function that would appear as an overlay as shown above and rather than saying update ‘score’ as it says on the current platform, we used the words ‘update pillars’.
Filter function
- A dropdown sort by and filter button were added in replacement for the extensive options of filters to select from previously which only confused users.
Share function
- Shown above is the new share function on the resource page, next to the favourite icon. This did not need any iterations following usability testing due to the common use of this function across various other platforms.
My Wellbeing
- This was main addition to the platform
- Based upon usability testing, we developed the ‘My Wellbeing’ page so that it had 3 subsections — Profile, Orders and Favourites. We gathered that they needed to be separated more from the ‘my connections’ and ‘my events and activities’ options.
Events and Activities
- Keeping continuity throughout the platform, we included ‘suggested for you’ under events and activities but we also included these ‘fresh new activities’ part which was informed from our research as almost all interviewees said they were bored of doing the same activities with co-workers and experiencing ‘Zoom fatigue’.
Marketing Team
- Under ‘my connections’ this is where you can interact with teams, clubs or individual colleagues. This wireframe displays Lily’s marketing team page.
- On this page we have added the ability to see and send small interactions which is what individuals were missing whilst working remotely.
To Conclude
To improve social connections:
In order to connect colleagues more effectively and improve the smaller work place interactions it was necessary to develop:
- Profile and team pages
- Wellbeing page with my connections, events and activities and the pillars
- Sharing functions on the resources
- A calendar function showing upcoming events
- Ability to send small gestures such as gestures or coffees
To improve the general user experience:
To make the platform more usable, we developed an alternative structure to the information architecture in order to implement the new features and make the whole app more usable. This included smaller functional changes such as:
- Side scrolling for ‘suggested resources’.
- The 6 wellbeing pillars as a clickable overlay rather than having the pillars take up the whole screen when logging in to the app.
- A more comprehensive and dynamic filter system.
Key Learnings
- We all learned very quickly how to interact with stakeholders and how to work in an agile way to help develop features as efficiently as possible.
- It was incredibly fulfilling to be working on such a timely issue and made me appreciate the work and want to make a difference. It made it a very enjoyable project to work on.
- Team work skills were developed very well and one thing I have taken from every project is that positivity is key to success.
Going forward —
- Test other variations of the features; for instance, separating the My Wellbeing page into the navigation such as changing the settings to a profile where a user can track their wellbeing progress. Another option would be to have My Connections on the navigation.
- Question whether the user would want to see notifications? As notifications is known to cause a feeling of anxiety
