Projects

Bridge Me

Bridge Me is a service that helps professionals working from home who want to have a healthier work-life balance by providing mindful transitional activities on a simple and playful voice interface.

Innovative

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Magdalena Bravo Flores

Elitnisa Solenay

Soobin Song

Wanqi Fang

YI Yang

ABOUT

Modal

Beyond the screen: Voice-led experiences for the low touch economy

More and more people are working now from home. Most of our personal spaces were not designed for the double purpose of working and living. This situation creates the difficulty of separating work life from personal life. Longer working hours and less quality personal time give the feeling of not performing satisfactorily in daily activities. How might we help professionals working from home manage the transition between a healthy personal life and a productive work life, so they can maintain a good balance?

Working from Home: Work/ personal life imbalance

In the context of the "Low Touch Economy" and the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are working from home. As a consequence of this new scenario, people are not changing spaces when changing activities. The same physical settings are being used for work and non-work activities. This blurs the limits between them and gives the feeling of longer work hours, less efficiency when working, more stress, and a low-quality personal lifetime. For instance, for some, commuting was a good moment to meditate, listen to music, cycle or just look out the window as a way to disconnect from personal life and get in a work mindset. After working from home, this space is not there anymore and changing mindsets becomes difficult as the distance between home and office is just a few steps.

Design Process

This project followed the double diamond methodology and its 4 stages: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. In the Discovery phase, online 1-on-1 user research was done to understand the reality of people working from home in different countries. The Define phase consisted of building insights from user and desk research understanding the main pains coming from working from home. It highlighted the blurred edge between home and work activities that caused confusion and lack of involvement. For the Develop stage, 3 prototypes of service were tested with users, then one service was created and finally, this was iterated resulting in Bridge Me. In the Deliver phase, the final service was refined, reaching the understanding of how it would work at a macro (business model) and a micro (interaction and interface) scale.

Service Concept

Bridge Me is a service that helps professionals working from home who want to have a healthier work and life balance by avoiding the blurred boundary between work and personal life and providing mindful transitional activities on a simple and playful voice interface. By providing a bridging activity the service will help users transition from personal life to work and from work to personal life in a way that suits them. In this way, users can choose from different types of activities designed for starting work, having a break, getting into a concentration mood, or calling it a day. The service will be accessed by voice in a playful way with the support of a screen-based system that will guide the learning of new users.

Bridging Mindsets

The service provides short activities that, as a bridge, help leave one mindset and arrive at the next one in a smooth way. From the information collected, Bridge Me provides a set of voice-led experiences that can be classified into 3 categories: Personal instruction, such as meditation, yoga, or stretching; Informative audio, like news update; And ambient music according to the moment (time) of the day. We believe these activities will work as the transition from one mindset to the next, replacing what previous daily activities did for us while commuting or changing spaces.

Inspiring Users, User-inspired

On the one hand, Bridge Me has been designed to inspire and motivate our users by creating playful voice commands. These voice commands not only are an order but also illustrate the concept of the bridge that helps you transit mindsets. For example, if you want to eliminate the tension of your body, you can say “Hey Google, yoga bridge!”. On the other hand, Bridge Me, a voice lead platform, has been inspired by our users. We know voice-led services are not of common use to our target audience. This is why we have designed a screen learning support system that helps new users learn the possible voice commands they can use (it is not touch-responsive). The more the users use the app, the less the screen is of use.

Projects

Bridge Me

Design Process

Service Concept

students involved on the project