Conceptual Design of Working from Home Based on Behavior Change in New Normal

Abstract

Nowadays, working from home has been the ideal working condition for people. Especially with the covid-19 pandemic, most of the office workers are forced to switch to work from home within a short period of time. This is no longer a temporary change but will be a huge change affecting our lives now and in the future. This research is based on human-centered design, at the very first part we do a widely-interview with people who work in different industries, the problems are not only mental health but also come from user’s inner worlds, so we narrow down to make a deeper interview to our target user, digital nomads, the one who derives income remotely and online, rather than from commuting to an office. After it, we made the persona and user journey to find out the touchpoint, to define our problem more specifically, there’re three main points (1) it is flexible but too fragmented at home, (2) inefficient working schedule, and (3) loss of connection to working partners. In addition, behavior change takes a big part here, which means when we find the right mode of working at home and persist on the basis of having a considerable level of satisfaction, it will become the new normal in the future. We come out with a conceptual application combining with smart home technology named Groovy, aims to let the user (1) reduce decision making time, the application will tell you what time is best for what to do, (2) observe and suggest better schedules for you, based on your working habits, and (3) reduce the feeling of loneliness. And next, we made the interface prototype and use Kano model for the evaluation to understand the services we provide are in which features.