Mobile Collaboration
in the Workplace

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Overview

Hi there! We are Team Axon and we are working with Cisco Systems, Inc. imaginging the future of mobile collaboration in the workplace.

The name "Axon", comes from the neural fiber that transmits information to other neurons throughout the human body. The term’s association with people and connectivity seemed particularly appropriate for our team name due to the fact that we are working with Cisco toward the goal of connecting people together, apart. We are a team of interdisciplinary Master of Human-Computer Interaction students at the CMU HCII, completing the capstone of our program. Working closely with each other we have experienced, first-hand, the pains, the joys and the epiphanies of face-to-face team collaboration. It is our mission to bring the magic of face-to-face communication to the digital realm with this project.

Hunt Statement

What has been our guiding light throughout our user research process and iterative design phase, has been our mission statement:

Research

Keeping our mission statement in mind, we created a uniquely tailored research approach. Its purpose was simple–to navigate us through our vast problem space, in the hopes of having a more directed investigation.

RESEARCH PLAN

Given the broad scope of our task, we settled on an agile, three-phase approach to our field research. By doing so, we were able to work iteratively throughout each phase—allowing us to incrementally increase our understanding of mobile collaboration in the workplace as we went. This gave us the opportunity to walk into each phase with more targeted questions and insights that we formed based off of what we learned from the previous phase. Ultimately, this made our research more effective, efficient and insightful.

With each phase, we immediately consolidated and extracted insights based off of the findings we gathered from that phase of research, which guided us to the next phase. By the end of the three phases, we were able to aggregate all of our findings, take a step back, and analyze our info to find larger themes.

The first phase of our research allowed us to observe the landscape of human communication and collaboration both in-person and remotely. During the second phase of our research, we visited professionals in enterprise and startups in Pittsburgh, in order to explore how people operated in industry. In our third and final stage, we visited various Cisco sites and looked at the way they operated, communicated, and collaborated.

RESEARCH RECAP

Throughout the research process, we used many user-centered research methodologies depending on the goals and research participants. By the end of our research, We:

• reviewed 31 academic papers
• analyzed 12 competitors
• gathered 71 survey responses
• observed 37 people
• gathered 900+ data points

using the folowing research methodologies:

• contextual inquiries
• guided storytelling
• interviews
• affinity diagrams
• dual-remote observations
• guerrilla research
• knowledge mining
• heuristic evaluations
• guided think-alouds

Due to the proprietary nature of our project, we cannot go into further details of our research goals or discuss our findings.

Design

Team Axon used an iterative design process to create a solution to the problems we identified.

ITERATIVE DESIGN

The iterative design process is a methodology where we build a fully working prototype from its conception by designing, implementing, and user testing the design, then repeating the steps with necessary improvements. An iterative design process is a powerful approach because it helps us “fail faster” or learn by doing, allowing us to learn from our mistakes and make the right design decisions as we progress further down the road. It also gives us the flexibility to make changes quickly during our workflow. Using mock-ups and prototypes, we put together three formal and five “mini” iterations this Summer.