Home Office for Everyone

Working from home promised freedom. It delivered chaos.

A research project was born due to the covid-19 epidemic, which explored the behavioral changes and new requirements of people's lives under the new normal state of working from home, and developed solutions and design patterns from a user-centered-design perspective.

Before started, we asked ourselves, why is this topic relevant? And here are some further questions:

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  Why is the comfort of working from home slightly become overwhelmed by the pile of workload and the accumulated psychological anxiety?

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  What causes working from home to become less and less productive and even to lose oneself?

Also found out the main problem of working from home: when you work from home, you lose the work schedule that you had in the office, your time is disrupted, and it is difficult to switch between rest and work, or your psychological state.

Digital nomads were selected as the initial target group due to their highly mobile work style. By focusing on their fundamental needs, the solution has the potential to be extended to a broader range of professionals.

The interviews with digital nomads involved participants from various roles, including HR, designers, front-end engineers, product managers, and management. Building on insights from previous research, we refined our interview approach. Instead of exploring problems broadly, we focused on predefined categories and asked participants to highlight the issues they found most challenging when working remotely and explain in details.

“(invisible) Strict Routine → (visible) Flexible Life Style”

Based on the research process, to have a better WFH experience, we wanted to develop a platform that suggests a better schedule based on users’ behaviour, helps make decisions faster, and keeps working partners connected. As a result, we developed three key features for the app Groovy:

• ·Schedule — AI-predicted focus windows based on smart home data; tasks appear at your peak energy times
• ·Office — virtual presence layer; see co-workers' live status to recreate ambient office awareness
• ·Learning — behavioural insights and expert tips to help you understand why a routine works