Overview

Problem

To date, virtual meetings have been unable to replicate the valuable moments at live events, when everyone steps into the hallway for drinks and unexpected conversations occur. Teams working from home aren't connecting effectively with one another because of tedious online tools, scheduling fatigue, and the lack of serendipitous conversations in business and personal settings.

Hunt Statement

How might we design a solution that connects colleagues during and post-COVID serendipitously?

Impact and Outcome

Our app is currently live on the app store for android and iOS. Our company is using it as a pilot, and as of now, we are still polishing the design.

Different from a UX case study, we aimed to bring this project into production. We wanted to explore the space of virtual meetings to see if there was an opportunity to better connect with colleagues now that everyone was working from home.

Through our research, we found that “Proximity and serendipitous encounters have long been associated with increased collaboration and innovation” Wall Street Journal. Given that, how can we develop something that simulates the serendipitous interactions like meeting at a water cooler, to foster relationships?

User Interviews

To learn more about the goals, pain points, and opportunities of the users we are targeting, we conducted 10 business colleagues interviews (5 internal, 5 externals).

Our research objectives were to:

• Assess the utility of the concept and understand whether it is offering functionality that colleagues need

• Understand what features and functionality could make the design more useful/valuable

• Understand what barriers might prevent a colleague from adopting the design

• Understand how the experience could be improved to increase adoption

Interview takeaways

After the interviews, I created a comprehensive persona that became essential guidance for our later platform structure.

The main takeaways are:

• Online tools to help others stay connected are causing fatigue during COVID

• People find the functionality of Squinch very similar to other apps. How do we differentiate to help fill in the product-market gap?

• People want to feel connected with others but feel like the opportunities to are limited, they’re strictly business, and the conversations feel forced

After synthesizing our research, we narrowed it down to the business problem which was tackling the challenge of connecting with others in a COVID & post-COVID world serendipitously. This acted as a guide for our mobile app concept.

Concept:

After some exploration, we came up with Squinch, an app that digitizes the metaphor of the watercooler as a place to meet to converse with colleagues in a serendipitous way. The way our design mirrors the “watercooler” is that in the homepage you can click on any of the groups and in them, you can swipe through random connections and call them, similar to you meeting a random colleague at the watercooler.

I then started to sketch and define the user flows based on the user requirements. For our MVP and end goal, we want to test out the main functionality of calling a random connection, which I designed and rendered out of the wireframes. I also designed the onboarding screens, which were shown to the users to ensure that they understood how to use the app before diving into the main function of calling someone serendipitously from selecting a group.

Takeaway 1: How do we simplify the homepage?

Users felt that the homepage was visually cluttered and the scalability of the groups was an issue. How can we make the app a more attractive app that will pull people to use it?

Takeaways from user testing:

• Reduce noisiness of the page

• Take out circle design in favor of a more scalable design

How did I compromise with the developer?

In this particular case, I was designing the events detail page, and the template I created was going to take the developers a long time to implement. They said the design needs to be the same format as the “call” template, which doesn’t make sense as events and calls are not related.

After taking a deeper look at the design they suggested, I realized that it could be improved with CSS changes, and even though the flow might be jarring, it won’t impact the UX that much.

Meet your connections at the virtual watercooler

Easily call, poke, or add connections from your group randomly. By “shuffling the cards” find a person you want to talk/listen to and connect in a fun way.

Onboarding

If you ever need help, you can go back to the onboarding screens at any time to guide you on using the app with visuals and concise instruction.

Poke your connections to get them to the watercooler

Quickly sort and filter the connections you want to see, and poke them to get them to the watercooler so you can call them.

Create and join a virtual event to enable great networking

Easily join and create a virtual event where you can join or listen to a group conversation based on a particular topic.