Corporate connection and the search for BetterSpace.

A UX design client project working with corporate mental health platform ‘BetterSpace.’

Who are BetterSpace ?

BetterSpace is the first intelligent marketplace for mental health. They are on a mission to improve mental wellbeing in the workplace with a disruptive, holistic and expert-backed approach. BetterSpace focus on prevention and true cultural change, rather than the reactive approach that has contributed to the rising personal and financial cost of poor mental health.

The unique platform combines technology, domain expertise and a broad range of best in class products to deliver lasting improvements in employee mental health.

The team ?

This three week group project involved four members as part of the General Assembly UX design course.

My role ?

Throughout the project I took on the role of the facilitator in order to guide and help navigate the direction of the team. The facilitator role was helpful in taking on responsibility but also understanding the wants and needs of the team in relation to the design process. I was regularly involved in interviewing users in the corporate space and was happy with my creative solutions in the design challenge when coming up with solutions surrounding ‘social connection’ in the workplace.

With most projects at General Assembly we were partnered with a project and platform that is particularly pertinent at a time where many are feeling isolated and facing mental health issues at home and in their working environments.

Here are some facts below that paint a good picture of how this project was particularly meaningful for us as a group — especially considering we had all been working from home for the last year.

• Lack of belonging was a problem even before the pandemic forced employees out of the office.
• In 2019, 40% of people reported feeling isolated at work.
• Now there is an even more urgent need to address the isolation from peers and colleagues.

THE BRIEF

• Create a new feature/s for managers to facilitate social connection for their teams and staff.
• Support regarding what metrics managers can use to view and measure their team wellbeing.
• Suggested UX improvements across the journey of the Website Homepage right to the journey of employees/employers signing up to take part in activities.

“I miss the water cooler moments that don’t usually happen online”

With this in mind, we looked at a number of companies who were working in the wellbeing market and did a wide range of competitor research

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

In such a highly competitive industry it was very important to see features
that are perhaps over saturated and leading on from that
opportunities to expose.

Having dived into the various competitors and market itself
we did a feature analysis and highlighted where we saw a range of
opportunities which informed some of the avenues to explore next. Work human was the only platform able to connect with teams which was an avenue to explore which really suited the social connection that is missing in a lot of corporate life, especially at the moment with WFH.

Opportunities.

These opportunities that we gauged from the competitive and comparative analysis included:

• Connect teams
• Attend events/activities between colleagues
• Use gamification
• Introduce calendars/reminders for social events
• Create a personal employee profile

These opportunities and functions were looked at in a feature analysis of other comparative competitors including the likes of Eventbrite and Dice.

User interviews

The interview process involved twelve users; eight non BetterSpace users and four new adopters of the app. When interviewing the non — BetterSpace users we were able to affinity map their user feedback into six categories as seen below:

“I’m less inclined to ask for help when working from home as I don’t know what someone else is going through”

User Journey

Our user journey was informed by user testing of the current app which highlighted the users really enjoyed the concept, simplicity and overall resources yet were frustrated when unable to share a certain resource easily with colleagues. Ultimately, this would help them to socially connect better. Another aspect that was frustrating to a number of users was being unable to fully understand which resources came under each pillar and an overwhelming choice of filters while searching through the resources.

Persona

Based on our research, Lily became the persona we developed that best represented the demographic and different viewpoints that we looked at.

“Lily needs more social connection at work because she feels lonely working from home and it is impacting her wellbeing.”

When we thought about how might we help Lilly with her feelings of isolation that’s affecting her wellbeing we started to develop some ‘How might we’ statements to better understand her problems. These are what we came up with:

• How might we make the platform more dynamic to use
• How might we create meaningful interactions?
• How might we better explain the pillars and personalise the experience ?
• How might we make the platform look less like a marketplace?
• How might we connect colleagues in a meaningful way ?

With all of these in mind we decided on how might we connect colleagues in a meaningful way was the most important when implementing and brainstorming during the design studio.

The design studio was done with the BetterSpace team and our team of four designers where we came up with a whole host of insightful and collaborative ideas including:

• News feed to see which events colleagues are attending/ recommend resources
• Send gifts to colleagues
• Share resources/ events
• Opt in to socialise on the app

With the ideas that had been created from this design studio we conducted a second design studio before sketching our initial wireframes with ‘meaningful’ connection amongst colleagues in mind:

From this second design studio we felt a number of further features were necessary in order to improve social connection with those working remotely. These included:

• Option of a personal/profile page
• Team/connection pages

The flows

Having taken all the insights from the design studio the flow was constantly changing throughout the iteration where the initial feature ‘For you page’ was added as part of employing the social connection strategy. The feature was best utilised when adding a a ‘Personal profile page’ to see events and activities and view connections etc…

Your Wellbeing

During the wellbeing stage we tested with eight users, initially doing sketch work and then into a low fidelity. This highlighted the problems where users were confused in testing when being shown how much space this took up. We moved this to the high fidelity which we see later on in the prototype.

In the third screen above (circled) users were confused by the top two features which already existed on the app with the bottom two being added as new features. With each iteration this allowed us to streamline and simplify to the highest iteration making it far more seamless to use in UX standards.

Connections page

From the wellbeing page you click through to the connections page aiming to provide a news feed for your team.

This is somewhere you can click on external profiles for your colleagues and as seen (circled) in the fourth screen are encouraged to send them a gesture of good will whether in the form of a ‘coffee’, ‘affirmation’ or an ‘invite to an event.’ Again, this is an aspect we really wanted to focus on with the insights telling us that users wanted access to those smaller social interactions throughout. Additionally, there was somewhat confusion amongst users surrounding the word, ‘affirmation.’ Having changed the wording we were confident with the social interaction behind the wording with one user during testing saying:

‘Sending a coffee was a bit like sending a hug when we are so limited virtually at the minute’

FINAL DESIGN

The prototype covers a lot of aspects while really focusing in on the feature surrounding ‘social connection.’ It was a really challenging scope of interest, especially surrounding the subjective nature of mental health and social connection in and out of the workplace. Having said that, us, as well as the stakeholders were extremely satisfied with the outcome