eWork
2020
Digital Product Service Design
UX Researcher / UX Designer
Embedded Files
Design Process
Design Sprint
Project Overview
The Coordination of Creative Work across a Distributed Team
As a multinational company, we have team members in the office with us, but we also have team members in Bangalore, Shanghai, and Palo Alto. People have creative and interesting ideas in all four locations, and we have to figure out a way to make it easier for them to work together to create value for your organization.
Problem Statement
COVID-19 forced much of the world quickly to shut down offices and pushed hundreds of millions of people into remote.
There has never been a more pressing need for organizations to rethink and reconfigure their businesses for a changed world.
Now is the time for international organizations to focus their efforts on handling their distributed team across the world.
Project Goal
Identify a product or service that makes the organizations’ remote team working productive.
The Challenge
We need to figure out what common collaboration problems distributed teams face and develop a solution to one that seems most pressing. The challenge that we have set is to identify a product or service that could be used to solve the problem that we are provided or the one that we have identified from our own business or organization.
User Empathy
The first steps were empathy and brainstorming with the user in order to understand the possible problems.
Exploration
To understand better who is our real user and what is their current pains and possible product and services, we used the Value Proposition Canvas tool.
The VPC is a part of the Business Model Canvas. It is a powerful tool for finding the right problem to solve, the right way to create value.
Value Proposition Canvas
Problem Definition
Goal Definition
Customer Definition
Customer Profile
Customer Jobs
• What key things is your customer trying to accomplish?
• What goals are they trying to achieve?
• What emotional needs is your customer trying to satisfy?
• How does your customer want to feel?
• Are there problems that your customer might have without being aware of them?
Customer Profile
Customer Pains
• What are the main difficulties and challenges into which they are running?
• What do they regard as too costly—is it too much money, too much time, or too much effort?
• Which risks do they fear?
Customer Profile
Customer Gains
• Which current value propositions delight your customers and why?
• Which positive social consequences are they looking for?
• Which savings would make them happy in terms of time, money, or effort?
• How do your customers measure success and failure?
• What do they view as a win?
Customer Profile Result
Jobs
• Remote-working coordination while feeling part of a team.
Pains
• Remote working is full of difficulties related to time and language.
Gains
• Working efficiently, continuously, and easily.
Prioritizing
Customer Jobs
Customer Pains
Customer Gains
Value Proposition
Product and Services
Which economic, time, and effort benefits could the users see?
How will your products and services eliminate negativity for your customers?
Value Proposition
Pain Relievers
How will your products and services eliminate negativity for your customers?
How will your products and services eliminate problems before, during or after they complete a job?
Value Proposition
Gain Creators
How will your products and services benefit your customers?
What economic, time and effort benefits could they see?
Prioritizing
Product and Services
Pain Relievers
Gain Creators
Value Proposition
Result
Topic-based channels, direct messages, voice and video calls, connecting with other applications and platforms, business communication platforms.
Fit
Value Proposition
Customer Segment
Hypothesis Testing
Testing Card
Hypothesis Testing
Learning Card
Customer Discovery
Multinational companies
Professional team
Any remote team
Early Adopters
Currently have a problem
Aware of the problem
Actively looking for a solution to this problem
Have put together a stop-gap solution to the problem out of whatsoever resources they have available
Have access to the money or resources needed to adopt the solution to their problem
Market Analysis
Identifying the Competitors
slack
Market Analysis
Identifying the Competitors
zoom
Market Analysis
Identifying the Competitors
Google Meet
Conclusion
Desktop Software
Branding
Conclusion
Value Proposition Canvas Tool
Conclusion
Value Proposition Canvas Tool
Learnings
In developing our VPC, we have learnt multiple important things, which will have a big effect on what is going next.
Multinational companies, in which members are working from different locations, are facing serious communication problems; especially when it comes to common collaboration, several critical challenges such as the diversity of time zones and languages appear.
As a startup organization, we aim to launch a business platform to facilitate the communication of remote team members. In the beginning, we define our target—multinational companies, for we thought that they would be our early adopters.
We have developed a series of hypotheses regarding how best to design a way for online efficient collaboration based upon what we know of the current platforms and what we learnt from people around us that have already the experience of using an online platform for professional purposes.
It seems that there is already some understanding of why distant collaboration is not practical, though. However, we felt that it was also important to learn about in which case communication programs could be interesting for different types of businesses. So, to refine our VPC, we interviewed fifteen employees that have never used a business communication platform before.
It has been difficult to observe directly foreign teammates to understand their problems, since most of them are living in different locations than us. Consequently, it takes time and effort for our team to manage that. It would have been easy to give up and just go with the regional colleagues, but it is good that we did not do so.
The biggest outcome was to discover that all of our conclusions about the barriers of efficient remote performance were wrong. Based upon previous experience, we believed that the primary drivers for using the online platform are to have all the professional applications in one platform and that the biggest things that corporations want to use are multifunctional platforms.
However, we were surprised to discover that the main problem was that the employees were stressed about missing conversations, deadlines, or meetings. They need no extra functions if they want to use a communication program. Closely related to this were issues relating to assistance. While functions of the platform were important, which is why employees were interested in multifunctional platforms in the first place, they need a partner to achieve this goal.
Next Steps
Our biggest next step is to work on programming artificial intelligence in order to help the teammates to manage their tasks. We think that this should be relatively straightforward, but it will take some development work to address.
Once we have done that, we will build a prototype and get some of these teams that are interested in a professional online platform to test our platform with AI assistance. This will tell us whether we have reached the level of success that people have in mind or not. We will also show our people in this group some mock-ups of what our platform could look like to make sure that we are meeting their goals in terms of voice, speed, and feel.
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