IDEO Design Thinking Challenge: Empathy in the Workplace

#DesignThinking, #RapidPrototyping, #BusinessIntelligence, #UXUI

Feeling unappreciated at work is the #1 reason why people quit their jobs.

We kicked off our design thinking challenge with a simple question: How can we increase gratitude in the workplace?

Empathize

Our five person team split into two groups and hit the streets to talk with real people about their experiences of gratitude and appreciation in the workplace. We spoke with over 25 individuals, aiming to dive deep into the emotions behind their experiences. While each individual had unique experiences, two common themes emerged when we combined our data.

1. Appreciation must come across as authentic to be well received

2. Workplace culture plays a key role in how and if gratitude is expressed

Define

Design thinking is about adapting, iterating, and learning to solve the real problems individuals and companies face. Based on the themes we unearthed in the empathy phase, we further defined our the problem. This resulted in a new question: How might we support a business in creating a culture of gratitude in the workplace?

Ideate

One principle of design thinking is the system of going broad and then narrowing down. In the empathy phase we went broad, getting as much information as possible. In the design phase narrowed down over 50 notes from our talks into a single question. In the ideate phase, we go broad again.

Any and all ideas are game - from the tame to the magical and the key is always saying "yes and..." to an idea. New and innovative ideas often come from reaching outside the box, building on other's ideas, then pulling back to reality. If you never go outside the box, you're not pushing what's possible.

During the ideate phase we generated ideas that included video phone booths, musical puppet shows, virtual reality devices, and much more. From our ideas, we again narrowed our focus down to a single product to prototype.

Prototype

Our original idea was to create a culture of gratitude by gameifying gratitude through an informational company handbook. This idea quickly changed and adapted into something completely new. Using "yes, and" language we built off of our ideas and came up with a prototype for a workplace application called Lunch Mate.

The first version of Lunch Mate had 4 key components:

1. An interactive map and seating chart of the office or building

2. The ability to learn about individuals, within the company through profiles accessible from the map

3. A lunch or coffee planning platform to enable co-workers to meet new individuals within the company and

4. A live feed similar to a Facebook wall where coworkers can interact.

Test, Prototype, Repeat

We put our product through three testing and rapid prototyping phases. In each phase we asked users to interact with our prototype. During these interactions we asked users to describe the experience and any emotions that arose while using the product. From their feedback we quickly made changes then went back out into the world to test again. Overall we tested our prototype with over 30 individuals over two days before creating a more formal version.

The Next 'high-fidelity' Prototype

We found that LunchMeet (we adjusted the name) would be most appropriate for medium to large sized businesses where individuals and new employees may get lost in the mix.

Users enjoyed the seating layout and personal bios and felt it could help spark conversation and strengthen community. Users also wanted gratitude to take more of a front seat, so we rearranged the layout to put the new 'Gratitude Feed' in the forefront. Bios also included information on how individuals preferred to receive and express gratitude enabling users to tailor expressions of gratitude to each person and better understand gratitude they receive.

Next Steps

Going forward, many users expressed the desire for specific functions or tweaking of existing functions. A/B testing of different features would be useful, specifically targeting users who work at medium to large sized companies.