Workpals

WorksPals is a mobile application that helps create a work-life balance. With scheduling and collaborating on work and leisure tasks with friends, it allows us to collectively get through our pandemic remote days.

UX/UI DESIGN CASE STUDY

Summary

Working from home has changed up our new normal. Homes are not just places of residence but now turned into multifunctional spaces like offices, gyms, schools, dance studios, prayer halls, name it and you'll be doing that from home. Humans have psychological associations with spaces like if you are in a prayer hall the ambiance and the mindset tell you the purpose of this space. Lockdown and distanced activities have tangled all these associations and broken our schedules and mindsets indirectly affecting our productivity and work-life balance.

Issues like overworking, procrastination, lack of innovative deep work have been identified by researchers closely studying the work from home patterns of users. With so much pressure & lack of social connection, the experience of people through this has been frustrating and infuriating. How might we design a way that could allow us to create a healthy work-life balance while having our experience fun & enjoyable?

tools used

Figma
After Effects
Illustrator
project timeline
4 months
team
Erica Kawaguchi
Jasmine Plumb
Ashley Sterling Lopez
Role
User Research
Prototyping
UX/UI

Problem Overview

Students & young professionals who are working and studying from home, tend to not have a healthy work-life balance. They are either overworking themselves or procrastinating, being easily distracted by all the different things they have to be doing today. With everything being remote, motivation levels have consistently dropped with a rise in social isolation.

DESIGN CHALLENGE

How might we help & motivate students & young professionals to achieve healthy work-life balance and increase their sense of achievement and satisfaction throughout their day?

Solution

Our solution was an interactive mobile application, WorkPals. The application is your virtual companion or assistant through the day tracking and guiding all your activities. It follows your schedule reminding you to take some mindful minutes or get to work on a time after cooking a delicious pizza recipe. The application is holistic in nature, encircling all aspects of the day. Following a comprehensive reward system, it rewards the user for an appropriate behavior!

PROJECT tIMELINE & MANAGEMENT

User Research of the problem space

uNDERSTANDING OUR AUDIENCE

Our primary audience for this application were students who are currently in university to young professionals who are working from home. Our approach to understanding the audience was conducting user interviews and user observations to gain insight on their work from home lives.
Through our 12 interviews and insights, we consolidated the problem space into user personas and pain points & opportunities chart.

BUILDING USER PERSONAS

After working with our user data from user interviews, user observations, secondary research, and our competitor analysis, our team came up with three user personas that would provide a direction to our product design.

Journey mapping - empathy mapping

To completely empathize with our users, we did a journey mapping along with empathy chart exercise to answer a few of these questions we had:
1. Where in the process do these user pain points lie?
2. How do our users respond to the problem and what are emotions they are feeling in that process? (Understand the mindset to probe the solution)
3. How can we make this journey and decision making process more efficient and seamless? What opportunities can we draw out from these pain points?

Information ARCHITECTURE

After taking a dig deep in our user personas reflecting their pain points and motivations, these are some features that we came up with:

Productivity features

- Notification reminders
- Calenders, timelines
- To- do list
- Work/Do not disturb mode

Motivation features

- Reward system - inform of pet treats
- Progress Bar on individual projects
- Motivational Quotes
- Weekly/monthly progress reports
- Fun challenges to join with friends

Leisure features

- Virtual pet as a companion
- Leisure section- in-built activities centred around holistic wellbeing
- Collaboration with friends
We worked to implement all these features but they are not explored in detail with the time frame of the project. Here is the system map that we built out allocating all the features.

Building the solution

Visual design

To develop the branding and visual design features of the application we wanted to go with a neutral color palette setting up a warm and friendly ethos. The supporting colours would provide a strong contrast allowing users to distinguish between our tasks. To approach our youth audience, we used a typeface Poppins which has a bolder as well as a lighter tone matching our primary palette.

project ideation- initial sketching

After brainstorming the unique features of the application, our group worked to integrate them in low-fi sketches which were then developed into initial wireframes. With lots of critiques and discussions, we took the best out of each work to develop low-fidelity mockups for user testing. Below are some examples of the same.

final product walkthrough

The final application allows them to choose their workpal and customize their schedules and to do lists. Additionally, detailed weekly reports show their hours of productivity and time spent on holistic wellbeing.

ONBOARDING

The onboarding experience of this application would entail allowing the users to understand the interface as well customize their experiences with their preferences like setting the time to sleep, wake up and choose interests.
Prototype Link

activity section

The users will be able to add new task to allocate its timeline, divide it up in mini-tasks and add their time frame allowing better organization and efficiency of work goals. They will also allow collaborating with different users on tasks giving them a virtual space to work together.
Prototype Link

do not disturb mode

To avoid any disturbances from social media or other applications, we would have a work mode for hyper focus where notifications and closing the workpals would result in losing treats.
Prototype Link

profile

The users will be able to customize workpals to their own preference to buy things for their pets in the treat store to follow their own and their friends progress weekly reports.
Prototype Link

leisure section

The users will be able to explore different activities to do during their breaks based on their interests selected. This will allow the user to explore new activities as well as earn treats performing their regular chores.
Prototype Link

Promotional video

We created a fun promotional video to summarize the gist of Workpals in a friendly way. We used after effects to make our fun pets animations!

REflection & feedforward

Workpals was a 3-month intensive project, we were able to sit with every phase of product development and research. This was my very first thorough user design experience with an incredible intensive opportunity to dive down into ample primary and secondary user research. I learned diverse methods from user interviews to remote walkthroughs to card sorting methods to understand and diverge the problem space. It was intriguing for me to see the proportion of time allocated to problem space was more than solution space which made me realize how important is to understand what & for whom are we really addressing.

A challenge that we encountered was doing all the user research and usability testing online because of the pandemic, so we had to adapt and work with & combine multiple UX strategies to design the solution. This was my very first experience working with a remote team, it was interesting to see how to efficiently collaborate in a remote culture. We ourselves were being affected by this problem so had to keep a check if we are not adding our personal biases to the research and solution.

One of the most interesting thoughts came from our users, about how pets are our support during this time so we decided to use that motivator & companion to our users. This was one of my key takeaways that it is so essential to know your user, could be the tiniest things that can change a direction of a big problem. Your solution should be like versatile and adaptable like water taking the form of the bottle it is in!