BusyBees

OVERVIEW

Project Duration: 8 weeks

BusyBees is a wellbeing service helps sedentary desk-based office workers who want to be more active while working, and prevent potential future mobility problems by notifying users to get active and introducing fun interventions in the workplace and encourage users to get up from their desk without affecting productivity.

BACKGROUND

The World health organisation claims that physical inactivity is the “fourth leading risk factor for global mortality”. In the UK, Public Health England has estimated that physical inactivity costs the country £7.4 billion a year.

The workday represents a significant portion of people’s time spent sat down. It’s also been shown that even if you exercise outside of work, this doesn’t mitigate all negative effects of time spent sitting down all day.

It is estimated that a sedentary lifestyle can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by up to 112% and of developing cardiovascular heart disease by 146%. These diseases combined cost the NHS over £700m a year.

However, there is evidence to show that small changes can have a big positive impact on people’s lives.

Target Users

We chose to focus on office workers who spend the majority of their working day at a desk. These people don’t get much opportunity throughout the day to move around as other occupations, and they have a higher risk of developing mobility issues later in life.

GOALS AND CHALLENGES

The goal of our project was to get users more active in the workplace. The first challenge of the project was to uncover the pain points that our target users had in regards to their activity levels, and where a solution would be most beneficial. While collecting research, we had to research ‘former’ target users to discover if/when their activity levels changed in order to pin point an opportunity.

Another challenge was due to the time restrictions. Due to only having 8 weeks to fully complete this project, we had to work quickly to recruit participants for research, co-design and prototyping. With our target user, this was a difficult task because we didn’t want to take up much time during their working hours. In future, we would hope to partner with a company so that we could use the same users throughout and streamline the process.

APPROACH

This project follows the double diamond framework.

Discover - using different research methods in order to collect research on the users and discussing project with stakeholders.
Define - using synthesis methods in order to understand key pain points and experience goals.
Develop - using ideation techniques to create rapid initial ideas to develop with users and stakeholders.
Deliver - experience prototyping concept with target users, gathering feedback and presenting project back to stakeholders and users.

For this project, we needed to work quickly and smart due to the short time-scale that we were given. In order to work efficiently, our team assigned discussed our skills and decided upon team roles.

The Team:

This was a team based service design project, working with target users and stakeholders to co-design an innovative service to enable them to stay mobile for longer.

I collaborated on each area of the project, however my key roles within the team were project manager, user researcher, graphic designer and presenter.

PROCESS

For this project we came up with a project direction, focusing on desk based office workers and conducted initial research on the target users and what schemes are currently in place to help get employees more active in the workday.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with our target users and spoke with stakeholders, each team member wrote reflective accounts of their time working a desk based job, analysed fitness tracker data from participants, auto-ethnography and observation. The data was analysed using affinity diagrams and customer journey maps to develop key insights, and to uncover an opportunity for a solution.

From this we completed some design sprints using Crazy 8s in order to come up with some ideas which would later be developed into a concept. We created service design blueprints to show how the service would work, how it would be funded, why it adds value and the journey through the service. We prototyped parts of the service with our target users and gathered feedback.

Finally, we presented our service to the Ford Fund representatives, members of Leicestershire County Council, our target users and to staff and students.

DISCOVER

My role as the manager on this project was important due to the time scales that we were working to. Each meeting we started by reading out an agenda that had been created by the appointed meeting facilitator. Next, we then discussed what we had done since the previous meeting and anything that was still outstanding. Then we discussed the next steps and I would create a task list. I learnt each team members skillset and assigned tasks to each member, with a date in which it needed to be done by in order to make sure that we were sticking to schedule.

Each team member disclosed any time they would be unavailable so that I could plan ahead, making sure that the project ran as smooth as possible. We would finish the meeting by arranging the time and date of the next meeting. We used a Trello board in order to keep track of the project. After each meeting, I would update the task list and send out a copy to the team group message, along with the details for the next meeting to keep everyone informed.

Research

To begin this project, we conducted secondary research into different types of mobility issue that users face on a day to day basis. Our research led us to the idea of focusing on future-proofing, taking preventative measures to keep users mobile for longer.

As a group, we split into 3 teams to collect research; Stakeholder liaison team, user researcher team and special team. This allowed us to make the most of our limited time. I was part of the special team, who mainly focused on user research, but we liaised with stakeholders when necessary.

Stakeholders

We met with members of Leicestershire County Council to learn about how they create and run services, what issues they had and what services and initiatives currently had in the area that we were focusing on.

Users

We used several different methods to uncover what issues users currently have which prevents them from being as active as they would like. We spoke to our target users, and retired target users in order to understand when the user’s lifestyle began to change.

DEFINE

Data Analysis

Once all the data had been collected, we combined all of our findings into an affinity diagram. It showed several trends that were mentioned through interviews, which were confirmed through the other methods.

We created an experience map in order to discover a time during the day where there would be an opportunity for users to use a service, which would help them accomplish their goals.

Some of the notable themes that came out of the research included:

Users became less active once they became desk based which sometimes led into their time outside of work, having no energy to do anything.
Users felt like they shouldn’t be away from their desks during the day.
Users ate their lunch at their desks and still felt compelled to answer phones or reply to email when they should be taking a break.
Users felt like they were being judged by their colleagues when they got up from their desks, or that their managers were “checking on them”.

Persona

From the research, we created a couple of personas so every member of the team knew who we were designing for, and what they wanted to get out of the service.

Design Opportunities

We came up with a list of How Might We statements in order to help us later in our ideation sessions. We narrowed the list down in order to decide on which area we could focus on.

HMW adapt the working environment to stimulate physical activity while remaining flexible to different working environments.
HMW make workers more physically active during their breaks without placing burden on their limited available time.
HMW make being active fun for users during working hours.
HMW feed back user activity levels, encouraging them to engage in their future health and mobility.

DEVELOP

Ideation

We took our persona and the HMW statements into a design sprint and conducted a crazy 8s session.

Each member of the team took a HMW and then had 8 minutes to quickly come up with 8 ideas. After the initial ideation, we took our best idea and draw it up in more detail before presenting it to the group, explaining how it would work as a solution. We discussed all the ideas and specific parts that we thought would be useful in our final concept.

Experience Prototyping

After our ideation, we took a couple of the ideas and began to experience prototype within the team in order to see if the service was viable. We created props and acted out potential key stages of the service, making notes and iterating.

Co-design

To make sure that the user was an active part throughout the whole project, we set up a co-design session so that the users could give us feedback on our ideas and help us to develop the concept. These sessions were really useful, allowing us to refine the concept, learning what would and wouldn’t work for different users, trying to accommodate as many of the changes as possible.

We spoke to an employer to discuss the viability of the concept, and whether it would be something that he would implement within his department for his employees to use. This session gave us vital information that we would need to consider for the implementation of any solution, and how we could make the process as seamless as possible.

Throughout the development stage, we created service design blueprints that would help to show the value of our concept. We worked with stakeholders to develop the blueprints, getting feedback on areas that we should look into, and also any potential issues that could occur. We also developed the idea with them, as many of them were also the target user, getting feedback on the idea and on the feasibility on turning the idea into a service, recommendations of how it could be funded and some potential funding sources that could be interested investing.

Value Proposition Statement

Once we had a firm idea, we created a value proposition statement.

Our wellbeing service helps sedentary desk-based office workers who want to be more active while working, and prevent potential future mobility problems by notifying users to get active and introducing fun interventions in the workplace and encourage users to get up from their desk without affecting productivity.

DELIVER

Prototyping

Once our concept was fleshed out, we tested our idea with our target users. We asked participants to wear a fitness tracker for 2 days.

Day one - their normal day so that we could get a baseline
Day two - we implemented our service

We compared the data from the fitness trackers for both days and found that users completed more steps on the second day, confirming that our solution worked in encouraging users to get up from their desks.

We had a debriefing session with our participants, gathering feedback on the experience and what we could do to improve it further.

Presentation

We presented the project to stakeholders and our users that helped us develop the concept. It was a fulfilling experience, and we took pride in what we had managed to accomplish in a short amount of time.

Speaking afterwards to members of the council who were in attendance, they gave us positive feedback and they invited us to present our project again during a communities meeting.

Final Concept

BusyBees is a health and wellbeing service that will be implemented into companies to encourage users to move away from their desk from time to time, creating a sense of competition within small teams by introducing interventions and challenges that members can earn points for using.
BusyBees uses a digital interface that notifies the user to get up at regular intervals during the day, but can be personalised on a daily basis. Each implementation of BusyBees is unique to the company. Some may not have any implementations installed.

The Service

Our core service would utilise current technology, such as phone health apps and fitness trackers, to collect current activity data. As part of our service, we would want to partner with fitness tracker companies to offer discounted trackers to users, but users could also track using their smart phones.

We will send notifications to encourage users to get up and move around, but they can snooze the notification if they are too busy.

Users will be encouraged to get up and visit one of our fun workplace interventions which may include:

A motion check-in point where users tap or wave at certain points in a certain order
Office hopscotch and hoopla
Piano stairs to encourage users to avoid the lift
And many others

Features

Co-designing customised interventions with our users to ensure that these are flexible to their individual and business needs.
Users will be awarded points for using interventions and for the number of steps they take in and outside of work, but will have a daily point cap to discourage cheating and to ensure users aren’t spending all day away from their desks.
Individual and team leader boards to encourage healthy competition. Teams will be reassigned regularly to prevent super active teams dominating the leader boards which may discourage other teams.
At the end of the month the leading team will win a prize and we would want to partner with local and national businesses who will act as sponsors to offer prizes, ideally related to wellbeing.
Run weekly challenges.
Weekly email reports of leaderboards and activity to users.
Monthly reports on levels of employee engagement to employers.

Video Prototype

We created a video prototype showing how the service works, the different touch points and the benefits of using the service.

Service Design Blueprints

We created service design blueprints, to show how the service could be set up and run.

COUNCIL MEETING

After presenting our project as part of the module, we were one of three teams who were invited to present the project again at the Leicestershire County Council Communities Board meeting. This was valuable experience presenting to a governing body that could help make connections and fund the project if it was taken forward.