The Future of the Work Place:
Vari is the workspace innovation company on a mission to create workspaces that elevate people. Vari created the original VariDesk®, the world's leading standing desk solution, and in just a few years sold millions worldwide. I had the amazing opportunity to partner with them and three engineers to investigate the future of the workplace.
We were tasked with creating a GTM (go-to-market) product and strategic plan that would help VARI gain a competitive edge as they explore the possibilities of the future of work post-COVID. My role in this project was primarily to: develop and conduct research, analyze results, build.
The Problem.
"How Might We Use the Future of the Work Environment to Create a Product that Enhances the Working Experience?"
The Process.
Our team was specifically tasked with looking into the world of working from home. Our team followed the iNPD (integrated New Product Development) funnel framework which consists of four phases:
Phase I: Identifying the Opportunity
Phase II: Understanding the Opportunity
Phase III: Conceptualizing the Opportunity
Phase IV: Realizing the Opportunity
We also utilized the Double Diamond framework to help us create practical and natural breaks in the four phases to diverge and converge.
Phase I: Identifying the Opportunity
The primary objective of this phase was to identify and explore a multitude of Product Opportunity Gaps (POGs) that would lay the foundation for a compelling Product Opportunity Statement, signaling the direction for a new breakthrough product for the workplace.
To uncover these POGs, our team identified SET Factors (Social Economic, and Technical) that we drew from an extensive range of secondary research sources, including newspaper articles, popular press, specialized magazines, and technical journals. We then curated a refined group of the most critical factors in order to help up specify all of the potential opportunities.
To uncover these POGs, our team identified SET Factors (Social Economic, and Technical) that we drew from an extensive range of secondary research sources, including newspaper articles, popular press, specialized magazines, and technical journals. We then curated a refined group of the most critical factors in order to help up specify all of the potential opportunities.
Through an extensive brainstorm session, our team developed 100 potential opportunities each aligning with the guiding principles of our chosen factors.
To distill this abundance of ideas into a focused direction, we employed weighted matrices and qualitative analysis to establish boundaries and scope for the project.
Through the refining of our set factors and POGs, our team was able to come up with a broad potential opportunity statement and scenario that would focus our next steps in Phase II.
Make the Office Experience Portable.
Phase II:Understanding the Opportunity
This phase is all about researching the wants, needs and desires of the core user, the human factors, and ergonomics that underlie the human action during the experience. As a Human-Centered Designer and Researcher, this was my favorite part. We needed to go out and talk to the humans who were actually working from home in hopes of understanding our opportunity better.
Goals for this phase include a set of guidelines that help take the actionable insights and turn them into product concepts, and in-depth understanding of the user, and a list of product characteristics.
The Research.
IDEO's Venn diagram concept illustrates the 'innovation sweet spot', achieved by integrating customer perspective, business insight, and technological capabilities. For our teams research efforts, we wanted to investigate each part of this diagram so make sure our product settled into the design innovation sweet spot.
Because we only had an opportunity in mind, our research in this phase focused on the human unmet needs and the business needs. We tackle the Technical research in Phase III and Phase IV.
Desirability Research: User Experiences
Viability Research: Business Needs
This is where our team conducted a market viability analysis to determine the practicality of a business idea or product. By understanding the demand, target market, and competition, we could make informed decisions, develop effective marketing strategies, and minimize risks for our product concept.
From all of our research thus far, we were able to start developing scenarios, a clear list of values from our core market, mood boards, product positioning maps, and synthesizing our Value Opportunity Analysis in order to have guidelines for assessing the concepts we started to imagine during the next phase.
Target Market
Product Positioning Map
Mood Board
Scenario 1
Product Characteristics
Value Analysis
Our research indicated that people were looking for a customizable product that they could easily integrate into their working from home set up. We identified our target market as 25-35 year olds remote workers with no home office.
This led us to create our holistic product definition:
a product that allows 25 -35 year old’s living in apartments who are unsatisfied with their current remote working conditions to have a versatile and portable product with the ability to transform their space into one that is can provide the office experience
Phase III: Conceptualizing the Opportunity
The goal of this phase is to develop a series of evolving concepts from the value opportunities identified in Phase II and to create a product concept that consisted of a rough visual aesthetic, technically feasible and perceived as useful, useable, and desirable. In this phase we continuously converged and diverged on concepts, testing as many as we could, in order to distill down to one final concept.
Through this phase we spent most of our time in brainstorming sessions and design sprints. We used our product characteristics as guidelines for our visual prototyping. Within these sessions, we sketched our concepts, tested our concepts, and used pugh charts to analyze and refine our different concepts.
As a team we then set out to design a concept in each of these areas. Individually we created 3 separate concepts, totaling 12 total ideas. From there we refined our competing concepts until we were able to develop 4 unified concepts that we believe highlighted one or integrated all of these aspects.
The Concepts.
Folding Laptop Stand
Modular Desk Design
Briefcase Laptop Stand
Foldable Screen
Concept Validation
After converging and diverging on these concepts, we created enhanced sketches of our top concepts which then lead us to gather customer feedback.
To facilitate this, we created a Qualtrics survey that would help us facilitate the interviews and record responses and also serve as the tool for our blind surveys. From the 50+ responses we were able to see a resoundingly positive response from the Modular Desk Design. Respondents were a fan of its simplicity, intuitive design, and lightweight look.
It was clear that this was the frontrunner design and that this would be the form factor for our final concept. In addition, we were able to gain valuable feedback about the Modular desktop and Briefcase desk. In particular, the heatmaps from the survey of which features they found most innovated show key findings about which aspects should be added and included in the final design
Phase IV: Realizing the Refined Product
The fourth phase is the proof of concept phase where we take the single concept resulting out of Phase III and create the concept work in a working functional model. The goal of this phase is to prove feasibility as well as differentiate the form and function innovations that make the product stand out from the competition. Lastly
From Phase III, it was clear that our validation testing showed that the modular laptop stand was the clear interest among potential customers. From here we began prototyping.
Our team began our design refinement through detailed 3D models. We loved the idea of this honeycomb shape morphing into a larger stand that could be put together in various ways to emphasize the moveable, personal, and modern product characteristics.
3D Model Ideas
Our team began our design refinement through detailed 3D models. We loved the idea of this honeycomb shape morphing into a larger stand that could be put together in various ways to emphasize the moveable, personal, and modern product characteristics.
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
Problem
Our team started with cardboard laser cuts to nail down the shape and then we moved to plywood because it created weight and sharper angles. However we wondered how can we make the form hollow? In picture two above we stacked cardboard into a 1 inch thick stack, but how could we make a storage box and speaker model?
Solution
We decided we could 3d print sidewall and glue the plywood to the top and bottom. We also started to paint them black for a cohesive look.
Prototype Builds
Check Back Soon for Final Design!
Due to pending patent, I am unable to disclose final design.