Introduction
This project was created in a 3 day hackaton in Aarhus (AUHACK19). During this weekend I have joined a team and we choose a case, brainstormed and coded an application inspired by the case given by one of the sponsors of the event: ZitCom’s need for efficiency in the workplace.
The case
Zitcom was one of the sponsors of AUHack19 and they hosted the case “Making work life better and easier through automation”. The case focused on how digital automation could positively affect their work live.
They wanted us to work with automation to make improvements to the work environment, building a prototype that showcases how it may impact their employee’s life.
Our idea
Zitcom’s Stay focused is a product designed for workers who wants to improve their deep focus skills at work. Worker’s can choose when to engage with deep work from a website from their desktop.
Users’ current status is displayed on a Raspberry Pi at each worker’s desk. If a worker is engaged in deep work, colleagues can see a progress bar indicating when they should come back without disturbing their concentration.
Our process
To ensure our vision, we spend a lot of time doing research to understand the employees challenges and identifying potential ways to automate their work-life. We were inspired by Cal Newport’s Deep Work concept to create an application that can help improve efficiency.
Through the concepts of deep work, we created quick personas depending on the user’s goal: users that want to create a habit of deep work and users who want to decide their moments of deep work.
In the following steps, we worked on the information architecture, sitemap and sketching interfaces.
Personas
Building personas was an important step to understand our users. As we had only 36 hours to work on the product, we wrote our user stories at Trello to understand each user’s journey with the application. Mads wants to work undisturbed for the next hour and Anne wants to check when Mads will be available to talk. As the application required interaction with Mads, we focused on the features we needed to add to make his experience meaningful and easy. By understanding Mads, we found the need for different profiles where:
users wanted to create the habit of deep work
users want to use the tool to make sure they were not disturbed during deep work moments.
Solution
According to Cal Newport’s concept of Deep Work, people have different ways to handle concentration. Following his concepts we then created two profiles to give the users automation or control:
1. the user can choose to have a notification on the same time everyday to create the habit of deep work,
2. or they can can manually start their deep work minutes to make sure they won’t be disturbed by colleges.
Both profiles have a different form of interaction and consequently different experiences using the application.
As we can see in the interfaces by choosing the Rhythmic mode, the user receives a notification where he/she can reeschedule in case they are not able to start their deep work. By choosing the Bimodal mode users need to activelly open the application and start their deep work.
More on personas
The application created for Zitcom focused on two personas: Mads and Anne. As mentioned on the last page, Mads had the possibility of choosing two forms of interaction with the application: create a habit or choose their own deep work time.
To create an effortless experience, we decided that a Raspberry pi screen would be used in a visible area notifying Mads colleges that he was in deep work. This solution was created to make sure Mads’ colleges would have access to the information without the need to entering a website or another application. The screen on the left was designed to show when the worker will be available.
Summary
This project was created for a 36 hours Hackaton in Aarhus. During the weekend I joined a multidisciplinary team, where we brainstormed ideas, conduct user interviews, designed and coded an application to help inform co-workers that their colleges are in deep work and shouldn’t be disturbed.
Learnings
– Designing and coding as part of a multi-disciplinary team
Working collaboratively with people with different skillsets can make for an amazing hackathon experience! We all stepped out of our comfort zones and learnt new skills from from one another, from design, code to hardware.
– Use of personas to scope solutions
The creation of personas was crucial to understand the interactions surrounding the application and how we could automize the communication between co-workers. By creating an indirect interaction between Anne and the application we made sure their she would have access to the information and Mads would not be disturbed.
*Check out more at: https://devpost.com/software/zitcom-s-stay-focused
