Bytedance

1st Prize of the ACM CHI 2022
Student Design Competition

BACKGROUND

Gratitude in the workplace is essential for group well-being and teamwork efficiency. However, showing gratitude to coworkers becomes challenging under remote work settings due to the lack of face-to-face interactions. In this project, we specifically focused on co-workers in enterprise companies.

THE PROBLEM

Compared to in-person work, people feel less appreciated than expected when they work remotely. Besides, they also feel less emotionally touched by the appreciation messages sent by co-workers via pure text-based communications.

MY ROLE

I participated in the whole end-to-end design. More specifically,

I led the research and proposed to narrow down our ideation directions into multi-modal interactions (beyond pure digital interaction design)
I prototyped the interfaces for desktop Slack App Plug-in part
I ran Speed-Dating & Wizard of Oz user testing sessions
I heavily worked on design iteration 1 & 2
I conducted live presentation at the competition, representing the team

CONTEXT

ACM CHI Design Competition 2022
2 months
3 collaborators

SKILLS

Interaction Design
User Interview
Speed Dating
Storyboard
Prototyping

OUR SOLUTION

Co-orb, an IoT desktop orb that creates a multi-sensory experience to bring thank-you messages beyond the screens.

Feel free to read our paper or watch the concept video below

IDEATION

Our ideation focused on leveraging multi-media to make up visual and auditory cues, enabling people to express gratitude in time, and fostering more gratitude expressions

CRAZY 8

To brainstorm initial ideas, we held a Crazy 8’s session and generated 32 ideas. After discussion, we narrowed down into 4 potential ideas

SPEED DATING

To gain initial feedback from potential users, we drew 4 storyboards and performed speed dating sessions with 12 participants who are currently working in remote settings

8 Speed Dating session with 4 Storyboards

Analyze Speed Dating Results with Affinity Diagram

Feedback from users indicates that people like “Gratitude Orb” idea the best.
Other 3 ideas did not go well because:

3D thank-you card

Why not work?

A medium for BIG favor, therefore limit the gratitude expression only to big ones
Not timely as expected
Video messages are too intimate for
co-workers

Digital gratitude garden

Why not work?

Not multi-modal, therefore less genuine
Can lead to social pressure concerns

Gratitude vending machine

Why not work?

Not effortless as expected

Speed dating feedback also further confirmed our design opportunities that people put a lot of emphasis on "effortless" and expect the solution to be not solely screen-based.
‍
Connecting the feedback and research findings together, we decided to go with Gratitude Orb idea and further revised it to address the problems we found in speed dating sessions.

INITIAL DESIGN

An IoT desktop orb that is connected to people’s work communication app and lights up when a thank-you message is received from co-workers

Express Gratitude

When user sends a message that contains “thank you” related words on work communication platform (e.g. Slack), the app will prompt to ask user if he/she would like to light up the receiver’s Co-orb.

Receive Gratitude

The Co-Orb on receiver’s desk will light up moderately. Upon touch, the Co-Orb will voice-read out the gratitude message

USER TESTING & ITERATIONS

We ran 8 Wizard of Oz Testing using think-aloud protocol and below are the iterations we made based on the testing results.

WHAT I LEARNED

Adding a little bit of inter-personal interactions can help make the user experience more touchable and immediately stand out from being a same interaction for everyone

WHAT I LEARNED

Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention

WHAT I LEARNED

Always provide more than one solution from multiple angles can tackle different user types

FINAL DESIGN

Co-orb, an IoT desktop orb that creates a multi-sensory experience to bring thank-you messages beyond the screens.

🌟 Multi-modal interaction

Build vision, hearing, and touch, three sensory perceptions in replace of face-to-face interactions

01 Perceiving Gratitude

Multi-Sensory experience
Enjoyable and Impressive

When an appreciation message is received from the co-work via team communication platform, the orb will be light up moderately with a sender picked emoji and the sender’s name. Upon touch, the Orb will read out the gratitude message.

02 Expressing Gratitude

Plug-in App
Quick, Easy but Effective

Plug-in app, installed in team communication platform, will automatically detect keywords associated with gratitude in the users’ messaging threads and prompt the users to light their co-worker’s Co-orb. After lighting up, the sender will see an animation that illustrates what the experience looks like for the receiver, thereby visualize the gratitude they are spreading.

03 Expressing Gratitude

Friendly Chatbot
Remind you to express appreciation

Prompt users to send more appreciation to co-workers based on the frequency of interactions

04 Collecting Gratitude

Retrieve touching moment
Recall appreciation message via emoji

Visit gratitude collection page to review all the appreciation you have received. The page visualizes all thank-you messages using emoji as an entry, making the retrieval experience similar to the gratitude movement on the Orb.

CONSTRAINT

Product was not implemented, but we considered feasibility & cost

Due to the time and resource constraint, we utilized projection mapping onto a normal lamp to showcase the experience to our users during the test. Using Wizard of Oz to prototype our product is the best we could do, but if we were given the development resources, we could build the fully-functional product using spherical LED panels.

Product application highly depend on company culture

In this project, we assume to apply this product in large tech-companies, such as Google and Microsoft since these companies tend to have a culture that .... Companies such as government institute or “old companies” may not like this product ... (TBD)

Product was not implemented, but we considered feasibility & cost

Product application highly depend on company culture

REFLECTION

Next Step

Evaluate long-term impact

Co-Orb is designed to be purchased and distributed by companies to their employees as part of a home-office kit, therefore, long-term impact is a very important topic to investigate before implementation.

Pitch to local companies and test in real workplace

Our user testing is conducted individually in experimental contexts, however, Co-orb heavily work between co-workers within working environment. Therefore, we anticipate to receive very different feedback if test in real workplace environment.

Extend the compatibility of Co-Orb

Support the integration with more work communication platforms, not only Slack.

What I learned

“Being simple” wins “Being comprehensive”

In the past, I used to be “comprehensive” during the ideation cause I hope to consider all user needs as much as possible. However, there’s no perfection solution to satisfy all. Even worse, being comprehensive can hurt all. Everyone prefers simplicity by nature.

Co-Orb: Fostering remote work gratitude with IoT technology