breather workspace
in collaboration w/ Gustavo Ramirez + Olamide Ogunjobi
design research, user experience design
+ visual design
oct - nov 2020 (7 weeks)
Breather is a workspace designed for creative teams to ease the complications of digital collaboration. The platform focuses on the needs of their users in order to work effectively as a team even if they are hundreds of miles apart.
01 / Background
Problem:
Since the rise of Covid-19, Breather has seen unprecedented decline as workers flee from office spaces into work-from-home environments. Teams are trying to quickly adopt to digital as they try to replicate how they worked in person and in offices. The current tools at hand simply aren’t built to truly facilitate the ways teams need and want to work together.
Challenges:
Challenge 01: Video first UI
Challenge 02: One person leads
Challenge 03: One person leads
Cultural Trend:
Teams are trying to quickly adopt to digital as they try to replicate how they worked in person and in offices.
Data Insights:
Over half of Breathers revenue comes from creative professionals conducting workshops.
57% Creative professionals conducting offsite sand large collaborative meetings.
Opportunity:
Offset declining revenue with a new digital collaboration product for creative professionals.
Innovating for the “New Normal”
How might Breather adapt in this digital
landscape to benefit its users?
02 / Research
Research Goal
We sought to understand what users needed to feel comfortable and inspired to collaborate with their teams when working from home.
Objectives
Identify the step-by-step processes used for creative digital collaboration.
Explore the emotional and physical barriers that hinder creative flow in virtual team-oriented settings.
Uncover what motivates positive team participation.
Interviews
Insights
For creatives, the work is central.
Creatives are used to working multiple platforms at once, but they are not centralized.
People have a hard time connecting with their coworkers virtually.
Our Approach from Research
A collaboration tool designed around the "new normal"
03 / Process + Design
Rapid Prototyping
As a group, we started out brainstorming using the Crazy 8’s method. We then dot voted to consolidated our ideas into three different concepts.
Crazy 8’s
Concept Development
The following are three different concepts we formed for the potential product. Each focused on different aspects of the research and insights formed from interviews.
This process then allowed us to further develop our project and goals into one centralized product with several of these features.
Through the iterative process, we honed in on the ideas
that created the most joyful user experience.
The final design in a three-section desktop application. The goal with this approach was to make the process and flow of creative digital collaboration easier for the users.
04 / Final Design
The first feature focused on the awkwardness and lack of closeness between teammates that may be encountered with digital teams and brainstorming. The second feature is a personal workspace with tools to work creatively outside of a team setting post-brainstorming. The final feature is a space to view the entire team’s workspaces and allows for group conversations/reviews of individual’s work.