Week 1: Part 2 — Understanding our users
A documentation of my time spent on the 8-week User Experience course in London
This post is a continuation of Week 1: Part 1 — Understanding Human-Centred Design. I decided to split the initial post and my research post up as combined they were well over a 10-minute long read and frankly a bit too much even for my biggest reading fan. As the title suggests, this article focuses on understanding our users.
If you’ve not read the first post here is a recap of our brief:
We spend 90% of our lives in buildings and these environments significantly impact our health and wellbeing, and ultimately our productivity and performance.
Aim: To help design and deliver a solution that will help residents of a building to improve their health and wellbeing.
Based on this brief and a discussion in our team we felt that the users we could interactive and research with were those in our offices or people who we knew, that worked in offices.
With our brief clearly defined I could now begin my favourite part of any project researching.
Preliminary research
As the team had decided what we want to focus on, we were able to look deeper into the what was outlined in the brief and try to generate some questions around the brief in an attempt to guide our research. Our initial question looked something like this;
Question: How does an office environment affect individuals wellbeing?
Obviously this question generated even more questions, but this meant that we should have a wide and deep understanding of our subject by the time we had done our research. We spent some time generating even more questions, even those that would seem basic or that we felt that we could answer ourselves already.
What do we need to find out to answer our initial question;
- What is wellbeing?
- What does wellbeing mean in the workplace?
- What workplace aspects negatively affects wellbeing?
- What workplace aspects positively affects wellbeing?
- What do we know about workplace design and wellbeing?
Now that we had a list of questions to focus our research around we were now ready to go off and start investigating. These kinds of questions were flexible enough that we could do both primary and secondary research on, I decided that I wanted to focus on secondary first so that when I wanted to do my primary research I would hopefully have more specific and useful questions to ask my interview participants.
What is wellbeing?
Before looking at any of the other questions on my list I had to understand what wellbeing was in the first place. According to Psychology Today, “Wellbeing is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. It includes having good mental health, high life satisfaction, and a sense of meaning or purpose.”
Further to this explanation, it appears that wellbeing can be broken down into 5 areas which may be why so many people have such a different opinion of what wellbeing means.
Wellbeing can be broken down into 5 areas:
- Emotional Well-Being The ability to practice stress-management techniques, be resilient, and generate emotions that lead to good feelings.
- Physical Well-Being The ability to improve the functioning of your body through healthy eating and good exercise habits.
- Social Well-Being The ability to communicate, develop meaningful relationships with others, and maintain a support network that helps you overcome loneliness.
- Workplace Well-Being The ability to pursue your interests, values, and purpose in order to gain meaning, happiness, and enrichment professionally.
- Societal Well-Being The ability to actively participate in a thriving community, culture, and environment.
What does wellbeing mean in the workplace?
Naturally, my biggest focus during secondary research was finding out how wellbeing tided to the workplace as I found more and more information I found this interesting article by the International Labour Organisation, that states “Workplace Wellbeing relates to all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and work organization”.
As our brief already told us, workplace wellbeing and performance are linked. The International Labour Organisation goes on to say “…Many studies show a direct link between productivity levels and the general health and well-being of the workforce”. Obviously what has been said here is what we already know from our brief, but at least this confirms what has been told to us, for example just because a brief tells you your users hate pink it doesn’t mean that they do and you should find out for yourself if that information that is being given to you is fact or opinion.
What workplace aspects negatively affects wellbeing?
The article that I found was incredibly helpful as it appeared to be written in a way that answered most, if not all of my questions. When looking at the negative effects of wellbeing the International Labour Organisation suggests that “A lack of recognition on the need to promote workers well-being may give rise to workplace problems, such as stress, bullying, conflict, alcohol and drug abuse and mental health disorders”. Naturally, these issues will negatively affect workers wellbeing however there is no mention here about the physical environmental factors such as an office space or layout.
In the International Labour Organisation’s article, there is a brief mention about the health and safety of a workplace environment, which we can agree makes sense, as if a worker has a fall due to a hazard then it is clearly going to have a negative effect on their wellbeing. But there is little to no mention of the physical space in which people work and how that affects their wellbeing.
What workplace aspects positively affects wellbeing?
If we look slightly outside of the workplace it has been well documented in the study by The Impact of Employment on the Health Status and Health Care Costs of Working-age People with Disabilities, that employment itself “…can improve an individual’s physical and mental well-being” as “…work can lead to better health through two mechanisms — financial and psychological”. Therefore we can assume that when people enter the workforce they have a good level of wellbeing, to begin with as being employed adds positively to one's wellbeing.
When looking to the physical space and the environment that we spend 5 days a week, it also well documented what has a positive effect on our wellbeing. In the UK a study by Mind Wellbeing Index found;
- Over 75% of organizations reported that staff have exposure to natural daylight helped support employee positive wellbeing.
- Air quality and lighting at work can have significant effects on brain function and productivity. Poor lighting can cause headaches, eye strain, and tiredness which can all contribute to stress, and thereby anxiety and depression.
The points above mimicked a lot of other studies and articles that I read. It appears that Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Fitness, Comfort and the mind are all areas in which the office space and our wellbeing are interlinked.
What do we know about workplace design and wellbeing?
A snippet from this Forbes article, How Your Office Space Impacts Employee Well-Being outlines that we may know very little about how our physical environment affects our wellbeing:
“Physical design has been shown to affect our mental health and happiness. ‘Design of workplaces to support mental health and well-being’ by Jennifer A. Veitch… showed that there is still a huge gap in literature that explicitly measures and analyses workplace design. Most of the research has been carried out solely in very traditional office environments and study outcomes such as productivity. Mental health has not been explicitly studied. Research in Environmental Psychology has long argued that physical environments play a key role in promoting mental and physical health…’’
And this research has struggled to stay current due to how offices have changed so quickly and dramatically over the last 20 years.
“The early 2000s saw the death of cubicle farms and the rise of open floorplans, and 2015 brought waves of ping pong and foosball tables to offices everywhere. While office trends come and go, one thing that does not change is the impact that the office environment has on employee health and wellbeing.”
It appears that open plan offices are a bigger problem to office wellbeing that I originally thought. Most of my research has led me to believe that there is a problem with open plan spaces, but cubicles also don’t work either so we’re stuck on where to go from here. And this is a problem affecting a lot of people as “Seventy percent of offices today are open plan, and the open plan layout can be fantastic. But it really needs to be implemented correctly with employee productivity and happiness in mind.”
If 75% of office spaces are open plan, how do the current office workers feel about this? And does it mean that office spaces haven’t been designed around the workforce but based on a trend instead?
According to this video, the original ideas and concepts around an open plan office have been largely misinterpreted and this may be the reason that this kind of office space has backfired. You can watch a great video here called ‘Open plan offices are overrated’ which shows how the initial open plan offices were meant to be.
Research links and references:
Psychology Today | International Labour Organisation | The Impact of Employment on the Health Status and Health Care Costs of Working-age People with Disabilities | Forbes article | Open plan offices are overrated
Hypotheses
Though I don’t think I’m done with my secondary research I feel as though I had a natural consensus and this is something that I wanted to investigate further:
People who work in open plan office spaces have a decreased level of wellbeing compared to those who don’t.
Not a groundbreaking discovery, but this hypothesis would mean our own that during our user testing, we could then find out whether this is true or not based. And if true, what aspect of an open plan office contribute to this reduced level of wellbeing. We have identified some factors already, but is there more to wellbeing that air quality and pot plants?
User interviews
Now that I had a hypothesis that I wanted to challenege I was able to focus on primary user research. The research which we had planned was both user interviews and a survey. The interviews would allow us to hopefully get deep insight whereas the surveys would allow us to gain knowledge but from a broader audience.
Interview goal
My goal was simple for the primary research, I wanted to find out how do employees in open plan office spaces feel about workplace wellbeing, and what do they think works well in this environment, where they think there are issues, and how they think things could be improved. With this goal in mind, I was about to start looking at recruiting participants.
Recruitment of interview participants
Now that we have a focus for our project we need to recruit at least 6 participants for face to face interviews. But before interviewing potential users we had to figure out which people we wanted to speak to in the first place. We had to create an audience profile that would allow us to select the most relevant people to our research. An audience profile can be based on a number of areas such as demographics, psychographics, context, technical proficiency, technology, user goals. One key point for any research is that you must have access to those within the profile as you need to be able to meet them if doing face to face interviews.
Demographics
Our demographic range was pretty broad, I would have preferred to target designers only as that is a community I am familiar with and have many contacts within, however, this being a group project I understand not everyone would feel that same as me. Therefore our demographics were quite broad.
Age range: 18 to 60
Gender: Any
Location: London
Ethnicity: Any
Industry: People who work in a professional office setting
Employment status: Employed
Environment: Open office space
Psychographics
Activities: Works with other people whether that is in a team or in a room with others.
Interests: General interest in their wellbeing
Interview questions
Now that we had our recruits in mind, and before actually recruiting people for our interview or survey we would need to make sure that they were the right people to talk to so we created a limited set of screener questions
- Do you work in an open office space? (Y/N)
- Do you work in a team or with other people? (Y/N)
The criteria for these questions was that if the people we were contacting answered yes to both, then we could continue with our questioning.
When getting to the actual interview questions, I decided to break down my questions into two areas; set up and core. The setup questions are just general and easy to answer questions which would help me create a persona later on. The core questions were where I expected to gain actual insightful information.
Setup questions
- How old are you?
- Do you have any disabilities or conditions that affect your work? (Physical disability, Mental health, other…)
- What is your job?
- How long have you been working at this company for?
- Do you work with others?
- What size company do you work at?
- How many hours do you spend at work?
Core questions
- Tell me about your day at work?
- What frustrates you at work and why?
- When do you feel best at work and why?
- How would you describe your place of work?
- What is your favourite place at work and why?
- What is your least favourite place at work and why?
- What does wellbeing in the workplace mean to you?
- Have you ever worked in a private office, if so how did how was that experience?
Though I don’t think these were the perfect questions to be asking, I felt that time was of the essence and that asking something was better than asking nothing so I decided to jump straight into my interviews as I knew that if it got to the Friday evening without me interviewing anyone at work, I would struggle to find people at the weekend to speak with.
I also decided to crack on with creating a survey and distributing it, once again the perfectionist in me hated this, but I felt that with a survey I was looking for a broad answers rather than depth like the face to face interviews would provide anyway. As long as I was asking open-ended questions and wasn’t leading people then the questions were good enough to distribute.
In part 3 I will be looking at what I found in my user interviews, survey and how these insights translate to an empathy map and personas.
Found this article interesting?
👉 Read Part one: Week 1: Part 1 — Understanding Human-Centred Design and starting our first brief
👉 Read Part three: Week 1: Part 3 — User interviews, survey results and Empathy Maps
