Handshake

(Objective)
Design Question: How can we help remote employees build meaningful connections? Sub Question: Why don’t remote employees feel connected?
Handshake is an app that helps remote employees build meaningful connections in their environments, helping them find events, people and coworking spaces in their selected cities. The app aims to build connection, exploration and discovery.
(Challenges )
Building meaningful personas:
  • Challenge: Understanding user needs was challenging due to the diverse, remote user base and rapidly changing preferences, making it difficult to engage users for feedback and observe their behavior effectively.
  • Solution: To address these challenges, I focused on targeted user research and used different feedback methods, along with app analytics for insights.
Iterative Design:
  • Challenge: Repeatedly refining designs based on feedback and testing with kids.
  • Solution: To solve this challenge, I iterated designs through frequent, engaging testing sessions and adaptation based on their actionable feedback.
Collaboration and customisation:
  • Challenge: Diverse user preferences made it difficult to create universally appealing features.
  • Solution: I prioritized user segmentation to tailor features and experiences that cater to specific groups' needs and preferences.

How can we help remote employees build meaningful connections?

My process

Research
User research gave me the understanding and data that I need to begin building the product.
User Flows and User Personas
Once I discovered a problem, I embraced it. This involved getting away from the computer and talking to people in their own environments. Building user flows and user Personas helped me guide my project.
Wireframing
Using all my knowledge, I built well informed wireframes to explore solutions and ideation.
UI/UX Design
Using hierarchy, type, text and color to bring the product to life .

Why don't remote employees feel connected?

Defining the problem

  • 27% of the US workforce works remotely.
70% of these workers feel like they aren't able to socialize enough at work. “I wish to meet new people and grow my network”.“It is hard to build meaningful connections as a remote employee”.“I often feel isolated & alone”.
  • Since I graduated college I have been working remotely and know how hard it can be working on your own sometimes. That’s why I decided to deep dive into this problem, with an aim to build an app that allows remote workers to connect with each other. A place to ideate, explore and find a community.

Building Personas & User Flows

Wireframing

Iterate

“Tree testing helps you gather insight into people’s mental models of a product and how they would naturally explore it.” — Melanie Buset, Senior UX Researcher at Shopify “One of the best insights I gained was related to the flow concerning location changes in the app. The task I created was: ‘Imagine you’re moving cities and want to change your location preference in the app. Where would you find that?’ It was interesting to see that most people went straight to the profile page and navigated from there. Since location plays a very important role in my app, it was crucial to make this process as easy as possible for the user.”

And here we are! Welcome to Handshake

Key Takeaways

Why Handshake? As someone who has felt the pressuresof remote work I wanted to build on the theme of meaningful connections. Handshake is an app that I feel very connected with. Why remote employees? The effects of Covid19 are still present all around us. There has been a vast shift in theway that the workforce operates. In times of such change it would be helpful to be able to form connections with people around us.