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Product Design • Mobile App • Research
Solo UX Designer
● Researching
● Wireframing
● Branding
● Prototyping
● Usability Testing
February - March 2022
Remote work employees lack insight into how much their living space arrangement affects their work performance or mental health.
The ability to work from home allows a lot more flexibility to our lives. So why did adjusting work locations from in-person to remote cause so many of us several work-related issues?
Empower users to elevate their living space quality with positive and effective interior design principles through examples and feedback.
Decreasing the time to look for design inspiration and collecting reading resources.
• Provides inspiration and ideas on transforming your living space to become more work-friendly.
• Personalized feeds to match your living spaces.
Receive feedback on current living space design.
• Discover ways to enhance livability in your living space and take actionable steps to do it.
• Scan your living space, and receive feedback on how to improve.
Have a community to talk and relate to remote living spaces.
• Forums and a social community to minimize feelings of loneliness and isolation about working from home and related subjects.
Starting with market research, I began to draw from articles on topics related to remote work and work-life balance, motivation, and living environment.
“My home was not meant to be for living and working full-time.”
Although conducting white paper research painted me a picture on the symptoms of working from, I've conducted interviews with 6 full-time remote work employees to get a better understanding of their pain points.
Some questions asked during the interview:
"How do you feel about your current workspace? Living space?"
If you could redesign and restructure your workspace, what would you do? Why?
"What challenges do you face when organizing your workspace?"
"Tell me about your frustrations when working from home?"
None of my interviewees did not have a living space that was optimized for working long hours and did not know how to restructure.
Based on the notes I took during the interviews, I've noticed how there is a lack of motivation or idea to reorganizing a living space so that it is more work-friendly.
Major Insights
Theme 1:
Remote Work Environment Affecting Mental Health
Working within small living spaces felt claustrophobic or cramped.
Unorganized, messy, or unclean working environments are distracting and bring down productivity.
Theme 2:
Limitations with Designing Spaces
Not knowing how to design for small spaces is a major barrier.
Work spaces within living spaces are smaller than preferred.
Theme 3:
Separation between Work and Personal Space
Separating workspaces from personal spaces is difficult.
Working from home is still preferred over on-site.
Maddy's Journey and Empathy Mapping:
Studying the Empathy Map above, I highlighted where opportunities could ideate a solution:
● Being able to compare current living space and inspiration photos on one platform.
● Decreasing the time to look for design Inspiration and collecting reading resources.
● Efficiently using time to collect design resources.
● Visualize new living space design before having to physically move them around.
I drafted and played around with several ideas on ideating a solution that addresses this problem. In the end, I designed a solution that incorporated camera technology and played around with Augmented Reality.
Based on various feedback from 10 peers, I continually iterated my design with 3 major improvments
• Menu cards enlarged to utilize the white space.
• More intuitive for users to scroll through menu cards.
• 80% of users would like to see a list of suggested changes.
• Users didn't find the language in the suggestions page useful.
• "Suggestions to buy new things isn't always helpful."
• Improved the intuitiveness of certain features.
There were many challenges and constraints that I faced during this creation of this app.Certain challenges that I had to overcome was:
1. Done is better than perfect.
There was a hard deadline on this project, being from February to late March of 2022. One of the toughest challenges I had to deal with was finishing each step and phase of the design process in time. Finishing a design without resisting to go back and refining due to a perfectionist nature is easier said than done.
2. Research Constraints
One of the most impactful constraints that I dealt with was my limitations with research. At most, many of the people I based my research on were my peers. While they did fit many characteristics of the market I was studying, I believe that researching people beyond my peers would change my design solution.
3. Going beyond the scope of the problem.
I believe that my solution goes beyond the scope of the problem. While my solution does address the issue of giving insight to remote works on how they may elevate their living spaces for work, this solution can be repurposed for outside of work intentions. For example, interior designers may use the app on their clients.
Thank You For Reading!
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