Designed workplace collaboration.
Skills Applied - User experience research | Ideation | User experience design
This project was part of one of the IDEO courses on design thinking that I had taken.
Project Objective:
Apply ideation methods to generate new and useful ideas
Identify the right parts of idea to test
Build quick and early experiments to prototype solutions
Refine ideas by sharing them and gathering feedback
Challenge name:
How might we encourage more collaboration in the workplace?
Phase 1- Ideation
Step 1: Plan
My challenge is to think ways to make collaboration friendlier and an encouraging activity at the workspace. The ideation methods that I am going for are:
Reaching out to my social network where we share common hobbies like biking, working out
Bringing 2 combination of places for taking references with the intent of making it more free flowing, rather than forced interactions - a pub + a workplace and a gym + a workplace.
Intentionally, staying away from my own colleagues for avoiding biases.
Step 2: Ideate
Generated 25 ideas. We ideated for about 20 mins. Some more ideation happened over a discussion with my friends.
The session went great mostly because here everyone was open about what works and what doesn't, since they were talking to me who is part of the same organisation. It becomes easier to provide unbiased, non-judgemental thoughts and ideas.
Step 3: Converge
Converged to top 6 main buckets from 25 ideas
Phase 2: Rapid Prototype
Who’s the audience?
All team members in an organisation.
What unmet need am I solving for through my idea?
Usually most of us shy away from collaborating due to several constraints. How to motivate people to collaborate and feel good at the same time.
What's the name of the idea?
Homegrown Think Tanks
When or where will people use this? How will people interact with the idea?
Online as well as physical space.
Phase 3: Reflections
Learnings about the idea, user, and the problem:
The most important part would be to get the right team in place. For eg: for any kind of collaboration, getting the team dynamics on point is the most crucial aspect. How to ensure that the collaboration within this team is also taken care?
How will the feedback inform my next steps?
One of the feedback that I got was - how to ensure that the team who is interested in collaborating to solve something real gets comfortable with each other.