Herman Miller is a modern furniture company for office and home. Living Office is one of their solutions, aiming to bring humanity back to workplace by creating a seamless office environment that drives collaboration and productivity. The company found a digital solution that helped to achieve their business goals, bring intelligence to the workplace, and to transform individuals’ working experience.

The delivery of phase 1:

(Left) Web-based dashboard to help facilities managers to access space utilization data in an effective and timely manner.

(Right) Passport app to raise the awareness of organization staff members  how they spent their work day.

“What is space utilization?” “Are users using the spaces well enough?” Organization executives and space designers found difficulties in measuring performances on space utilization as it is uneasy to answer these questions effectively in a timely manner. In project phase 1, our team tackled the above problems by using iBeacons technology catering for spaces utilisation data. Organizations can use the web-based dashboard for real-time access to information of all their offices remotely.

FINDINGS ■

After launching phase 1, our team met with Herman Miller staff and found that the app was not as popular as expected among staff members.  Having staff members to utilize the app became the primary goal of the next development phase.

To start with, our team conducted a few validation study sessions with the potential users. Each validation session contained 2 parts, namely usability testing and opportunity scoring activity.

A participant was performing a task to locate her colleague with the app.

For the usability testing part, we provided the participants with the guidelines and task scenarios, engaging them to interact with the existing Passport app interface. At the same time, participant verbalized their thoughts to our team as they moved through the interface. We successfully spotted what caused users trouble while they were using the app and this research session gave us insights on how to improve the design.

To obtain more ideas for the next iteration of Passport, we created an opportunity scoring questionnaire for potential users, asking them to score the importance and current satisfaction of the provided statements.

The items with the highest opportunity scores are:

SOLUTIONS ■

We proposed a new reiteration of Passport app which is to adopt  a ‘Space centric’ (a.k.a. Google Map) approach in order to offer the highest sensibility in product differentiation and feature scalability.

Highlighted features:

CHALLENGES ■

When the new phase was first started, our team had a very different view from our  clients about the project direction. Our clients intended to develop Passport into a community platform with functions of improving internal communications through news feed and chat room, etc. However, we had reservations about this direction. We kept contemplating on what the end users would think about this. We conducted in-depth interviews with potential users and most of them stated how much they would feel uncomfortable with expressing their personal opinions on a company’s community platform with their identities being exposed. Quite a few interviewees said that they were already satisfied with the tools they used. For instance, since Skype had been used for work-related conversations and Whatsapp had been used for casual chats. An extra communication tool would seem to be unnecessary and redundant. 

Our team consolidated the interview insights together with the result of opportunity score and counter-proposed the ‘Space centric’ approach. Our client  was very happy with it. We went ahead with the new ideas, made the designs and got engineering works ready to get started. 

LEARNINGS ■

We had bi-monthly meetings with our clients. During the meeting, we reported project progress, prioritize user stories and put  the most valuable items to the top of the product backlog. We worked closely with the clients and made project planning effectively. Our team was benefited as well. The roadmap enabled every team member to keep in sync and be aware of the work progress, smoothing the development process and giving us a clear vision of project success.

We made design iteration, repeated continuous cycle of prototyping, testing, and made  adjustments and refinements. As a result, usability improved to a great extent. For instance, there was a usability issue for the feature Peer-to-Peer Finder: users failed to associate the icon with its actual function. After ‘Space centric’ approach is introduced, finding colleagues is as easy  as finding nearby restaurants on a Google map.

UI/UX improvement:

(Left) Before the design iteration, it is hard to recognize the functionality behind icons.

(Right) After the design iteration, smart search function was presented as Google map-like interface.

RESULTS ■

Passport was a new technology service from Herman Miller Asia Pacific. When it was first presented, it had received great interest from premier clients and facility managers. Later, Passport successfully approached a number of Hong Kong and MNO clients. As of 2018, over 40 sites adopted Passport.

My former company has worked with Herman Miller for Passport since 2016. we had gradually developed trust and tacit understanding with Herman Miller. During my tenure, I also helped another team on rapid prototyping their business idea. We desire to see our clients succeed, in the sense that we perceive our relationships with clients as relationships that can go beyond individual project development. Every little thing we did eventually made us become more an enterprise partner than a project vendor or supplier.

■ OTHER PROJECTS ■