At the end of the previous milestone, our group introduced three ubicomp ideas aimed at augmenting the digital workspace: a foldable/rollable screen that could be attached to walls, a digital notebook that integrates with laptops, and a smartboard with AR integration. We knew we wanted to focus on making workspaces better for people working from non-office environments, but had not settled on the best angle from which to do so. Since completing our first milestone and conducting research, our group has come closer to finding that angle: we pivoted from the goal of expanding the digital workspace to enhancing the digital workspace, ideally while helping people overcome the feelings of isolation or environmental fatigue they may be experiencing these days.

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. Our diary study was administered in the form of a Google Form where we prompted the participants with open-ended questions about how they felt about their workspaces on a particular day. In the form, 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. The link to our form is found here.

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. We designed and administered our survey using Qualtrics. Our survey consisted of 7 questions, including a mix of multiple choice, rating, and open-ended response questions. A link to our survey is found here.

We launched the survey to the UMSI community and received a total of 145 responses over a span of two days. Because we had received more responses than expected in a short amount of time, we stopped collecting responses after these 2 days.

Research Questions

Through our two methods, we strived to understand

1. How people feel about their current home workspace environment

2. How people manage their current home workspaces

3. How people's work habits and work environments have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Each of our team members individually analyzed the data that we collected from the diary study and the survey, and we discussed the key insights from the data as a team. The following were the key insights that we found:

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. When people set up their workspace with more than 2 external monitors, they reported to have enough screen space.

• 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; it included people who were working at home and a mix of home and workplace. People reported they needed different environments to work, so they tended to wander around the house to find workspaces on a regular basis if their home had enough room to allow it. For example, users worked in their kitchen, living rooms, and bedrooms, and before COVID, would also work at coffee shops.

• Since most people are working at home due to COVID, many people had issues with effective work-life balance and productivity.

People felt that there was no boundary between home and work. Their work environments were where they always were, so people felt difficulty putting work aside and not have it pervade every aspect of life. For example, some users said it had been harder to stop working at lunch and in the evening. They worked longer hours than they had been prior to COVID. Therefore, people reported that they felt less motivated and productive, even when they were spending more time working. Furthermore, since users have to spend a lot more time sitting at their computer, it led them to get screen fatigue.

• Some users struggled with distractions in their home workspaces.

People are often living with others and face distractions that they would otherwise not experience at an external work setting. For instance, users distracted by the noise from outside, their families, or meeting noise from their roommates. People said it was harder to focus on their work due to those distractions.

• 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.

When we first started the project, our team was focusing on limited workspaces, in particular, limited screen workspaces. Our team discovered that people were struggling with a wider variety of things surrounding home workspaces, such as feelings of isolation, fatigue with their environments, and limited physical space, in addition to limited digital workspaces. These findings led us to consider the wider needs of our users, so we decided to change the scope of our project to enhancing the workspace, not only expanding it. We were also able to further integrate these core observation into three main categories: portable, productive, and convenient. These three main categories perfectly reflect the core findings from our diary study and survey.

As we outlined our three main values of portable, productive, and convenient, we discussed potential products that would be able to enhance the workspace. During our ideation process, we wanted to solve our new findings that we found from our studies including environmental fatigue, the feeling of isolation, and distraction.

We have built a set of criteria to determine and select which solutions we would be valuable to meet users need:

• Useful: The product should fulfill a need of users. It has to support users to overcome their limited workspace and help them to feel their workspace is efficient enough.

• Adjustable: It should be adjustable to fit any size the user wants.

• Easy to use: Making sure it is accessible to all users.

• Predictable: The product should provide interaction what users would expect from it.

After identifying criteria, we went through our last solutions on milestone #1 and discussed to create three concepts that would be the best fit for our criteria.

As a result of our further ideation and research, we have moved from just "expanding the workspace" of the user to "enhancing the workspace", using technology to change the entire workspace instead of just solving the problem of not having enough room. We currently have not selected one final project to continue working on but we will work on finalizing it with feedback and further reflection.