Flexiscreen

Flexibly enhance your workspace

Introduction

With the onset of restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we found that many were starting to complete computer-based work and studies from their homes, where they often have smaller or more limited workspaces than they would have in corporate work environments or classrooms. We wanted to focus on making workspaces better for people working from home with limited workspace. Therefore, our aim for this project was to design a product that would enhance and expand the digital workspace.

We designed Flexiscreen, which is a flexible second monitor used to enhance the user's workspace. Our product is versatile, being easily attachable to walls, and it can also be unfolded or collapsed to various sizes. We believe that our product will allow our target user group, those who are currently working at home with limited workspace, to work or study more comfortably.

Motivation

Our team’s motivation to create the Flexiscreen came from our experiences of working remotely during the pandemic. For months now, we have spent our days sitting at overcrowded desks and tables, managing multiple windows on our small screens, trying to pay attention in lectures and meetings while our necks, wrists, and eyes strain. We also saw the hardships experienced by our friends and loved ones: teachers teaching remotely from their living room couches, siblings staring into screens a foot away from them for 8 hours a day. We knew there had to be a better way to work and learn remotely, so we channeled our frustrations toward designing something that would not just extend, but enhance our remote workspaces.

Key Insights: Formative Study & Results

Diary Study

We conducted a diary study with 5 participants. All participants were students or young professionals who reported to work and study from home since the COVID-19 pandemic. In our study, we prompted the participants with open-ended questions about how they felt about their workspaces on a particular day. We also prompted participants to provide us a photograph of their workspace on that particular day, as well as a description about why they decided to capture that particular moment. The participants filled out the same form for 5 consecutive days. We conducted the study with each participant for 5 days, resulting in a total of 25 responses. As we made the photo inclusion optional, we collected a total of 13 photos of home workspaces.

Survey

We designed a survey to better understand peoples' work environments, approaches for working from home, satisfaction levels with their current workspace, as well as work habit changes developed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our survey consisted of 7 questions, including a mix of multiple choice, rating, and open-ended response questions. We launched the survey to the UMSI community and received a total of 145 responses over a span of two days.

Research Questions

Through our two methods, we strived to understand:

How people feel about their current home workspace environment
How people manage their current home workspaces
How people's work habits and work environments have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Key Insights

Most people invested effort and money to improve their home workspace.

Since users didn't expect working at home, they didn't set up their home office environment. People switched their desks, bought monitors to expand their screen workspace, purchased mesh network gear, and changed the environment of particular spaces like their living rooms. This was a good sign for us, because it indicated a growing market for our product.

People often seek other sceneries when they were working at their home workspace

According to our survey results, over 98% of users were working at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People reported they needed different environments to work, so they tended to work in various areas of their homes. From this insight, we learned portability ought to be a pillar of our product.

People felt isolated because of lack of interaction with other people.

People usually had in-person meetings, working from a coffee shop for a change of scenery, and being able to go to the library and school to study or work. However, none of those other options were available now, and being at home alone led them to feel isolated. Some people reported they missed being able to converse with and see colleagues.

Key Insights: Experience Prototyping & Results

User Enactments

To help us come up with user enactment scenarios, we completed a speed dating activity in which we defined three dimensions our product would consider. This resulted in a total of 27 scenarios. We then selected 5 that were the most different from each other, and that utilized different potential features of the product. Our specific scenarios and associated user tasks can be found in Milestone 3.

To come up with scenarios, we focused on the following dimensions:

User familiarity with the product
Level of automation
Scenario/situation

Research Questions

Our team set three main research questions for our user enactments:

How do users feel about the level of automation of the product?
In which situations would the product be most useful?
How would users make the product fit in their (limited) workspaces?

Set-up + Debrief

Because our teammates are currently located in different areas, we each conducted our own user enactments. Three teammates conducted their user enactments in person with people they are living with, while one teammates conducted them remotely due to COVID limitations. For our in-person testing, we used a poster board to act as the product, and paper prototype to act as our interfaces. One team member tested using a tablet instead of paper prototypes. For each scenario, we read out the scenario, set up the prototypes appropriately, and prompted the user to speak through what they were thinking as they went through the actions involved with our scenarios. After each enactment, we conducted debrief interviews. we asked their feeling about interaction, having similar scenery while they work, or the level of automation.

Key Insights & User Quotes

1. Users want to have control over the system and not have it be completely automated.

“This [automation] takes a lot of overhead off me, but I would like to know what data it is getting [from my main system]”

2. Most users found it helpful that the product had its own dashboard system, but they would like for it to be more intuitively designed

“I don’t understand what the ["connect to laptop"] button means”
“It would be great to have the dashboard suggest the apps I can use right now...it’s kind of like an assistant”

3. Most users were enthusiastic about our scenery projection idea, but they do not want it to interrupt their work pattern and display a scene when the screen is in fact being used.

“ I really like the scene showing because it’s hard to disconnect from work.”
“...What if I want to use the screen for something else?”

4. Users displayed several gestures for performing actions on the screen

5. Users were enthusiastic about the screen being able to fold into multiple sizes, and they were further curious about how many windows the screen can support.

“I would like to display everything I have, like messengers, textbooks, and Canvas.”

We used several insights from both the formative study and experience prototyping to come up with the concept and feature mechanisms of our final product.

Final System Concept

Key Feature 1: Flexible material

In addition to the large-scale findings mentioned above, in our user research, we found that users prefer using different screen sizes, and this usually depends on the type of work the user is doing. Putting this finding together with our desire to come up with something flexible, we decided that a main feature of our product is that it would be made of flexible material that can be folded to any size and dimension the user wishes.

Our product would be made of foldable material, similar to this mockup above

Key Feature 2: Fits in any environment

We found that users prefer to work in various environments, and seek different sceneries when working. To address this finding, we introduce the ability for our product to fit in any space by making it mobile and have the ability to stand on surfaces and stick to walls. Within Flexiscreen, we also introduce a supplemental feature that lets users display scenery of their choice when the Flexiscreen is not being used as a second monitor. This feature is accessible from both the Flexiscreen and main system’s dashboards.

Key Feature 3: Sophisticated and quick set-up and syncing procedure

We found that users desire an easy-to-use system that they can have control over. We address this through sophisticated set-up and syncing flows that allows users to be easily on-boarded onto the system and display windows on the Flexiscreen with ease.

Set-up flow:

Upon turning on the screen, the users will be taken step by step through a set-up and syncing system. They will select which device to sync to, select which apps to sync, and finally be presented with the Flexiscreen’s dashboard which shows the users the apps they have synced, as well as other feature options. Once synced, a red light will be activated on the Flexiscreen. In our demo, we conveyed this action using a LED light.

Main system dashboard:

Once the user has set up Flexiscreen, their main device’s desktop will have a mini dashboard indicating the status of their Flexiscreen. This dashboard will display the screens that are currently being displayed on Flexiscreen, their synced apps, and general system information like date and battery level.

The user's main system would include the Flexiscreen dashboard on the side

To move a window from the user’s main device to the Flexiscreen, the user simply drags the window over to the dashboard. The dashboard gives feedback by showing the most recently moved window first on the display of user’s “on display” screens.

The user can simply drag a window over to the dashboard. That window will then be displayed on the Flexiscreen.

Video

The video walkthrough of our product is shown below.

Final Video.mp4

Prototype Shots & Key Features

The Flexibility of the Flexiscreen

The Flexiscreen can be used as a small tablet, however it can also be expanded by "unfolding" the device to increase the size of the device. The Flexiscreen allows the user to determine the size of the device in order to suit their environment.

In our demo, we used a tablet to represent the Flexiscreen when it is "folded" to a small size

In our demo video, we use a posterboard to show the Flexiscreen attaching to the wall, and use video editing to overlay the Flexiscreen's dashboard onto it

Versatility & Syncing Process

In our demo video, we show that the system is versatile by showing that the user can use it when it is "folded" to be small (using a tablet), and "spread out" to be large (using posterboard). In a few shots of our video, we show a walkthrough of syncing process, which is described in the Final System Concept (Key Feature 3) above.

We integrate a LED light in our prototype, which lights up when the Flexiscreen has been synced with the main system.

Prototype:

For our prototype we decided to focus on the key features of the device, as we were working together remotely and did not have the materials to create a prototype beyond low fidelity. Our demo video (shown above) demonstrates the key features of the Flexiscreen, showing the device being used in a variety of ways and locations, in different forms, and syncing to the user's main device.

Ideal System Proposal

We attempted to have our demo product capture the key features of Flexiccreen. Our ideal system proposal was enabling users to extend and enhance workspace with the ability to act in tandem with users’ desktop and laptop computers and applications.

Mainly, our ideal system offers the following, a majority of which we were able to convey in our demo:

Offer users an adjustable increase in screen space, which our research shows is correlated to decreased stress and increased productivity
Offer increased portability; users could easily bring the screen with them wherever they go and use it in a variety of places and situations, including: mounted on a desk, attached to a wall, or between their fingertips
Offers a new primary or secondary monitor, or "tiles" within monitors, which could be used alongside a computer or as a standalone device: users could sync their desktop applications to their foldable screen and then use their foldable screen without their desktop machine

These features would allow users to create their ideal workspaces with following steps: The product automatically syncs with the computer and tracks the apps that the users frequently use on their computers. Users can select which apps to sync with Flexiscreen, and users can see the Flexiscreen dashboard on their main system. After that, Flexiscreen interacts with the users using LED feedback to show syncing status and using foldable screens. The image below shows the basic architecture of our proposed product.

Reflection

While we were initially enthusiastic about the concept and potential of our product, throughout the semester, we actually realized that our idea did not lend itself well to a comprehensive prototype. Unlike some product ideas by other student teams, our product did not particularly use any sensors, nor touch or voice based interactions, so we found ourselves stuck when it came to creating a demo of our system using prototyping tools and methods we learned. In hindsight, we would have come up with a product idea that would have been more easily prototyped and demonstrated.

Therefore, there are several limitations to our designs. First, a major feature of our product is its flexibility - the ability to fold and unfold the product to any size the user wants due to the flexibility of the material it is made of. As there was no material we could have used to effectively prototype this feature, we decided to use a posterboard and tablet to represent the flexibility of our product. In this sense, we believe our prototype is limited compared to the actual idea we are envisioning because we are not able to show the screen actually unfolding, and we only show two "sizes" of the product. Second, in our demo, we used video editing to make it seem like the LED light was turned on once the Flexiscreen has synced. Because it was impossible to actually program a syncing procedure between systems, we used Figma prototypes to show the flow of how this process would work; therefore, it was impossible to program the light to light up in response to syncing, when this was what we had actually intended for the product (see “Ideal System Proposal” above).

Given that there exists flexible material that can be used as a screen-based display, we believe that our product can be realized within the next 2-3 years. We believe the majority of effort will be placed toward engineering the hardware of the product, as we would want the product to be flexible, foldable, and mobile. The software would require a fluid syncing system between the Flexiscreen and main system, which we believe would be easily buildable with current technology.

Overall, we learned a lot through the project. We especially enjoyed getting to learn and practice new user research methods like diary studies and user enactments. As mentioned, in hindsight, we would have liked to select a product idea that lended itself better to IoT prototyping techniques, but we still believe that we were successfully able to convey the main ideas and features of our system through the video with the constraints that we had.

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