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Overview
Say What You See (SWYS) is a digital activity that facilitates young professionals in emotional management and resolving interpersonal conflicts at the workplace. SWYS utilizes a collaborative drawing interface to encourage people to draw, talk and share about conflicts, and finally reach a common starting point for resolving conflicts.
Timeline
08/2021 - 12/2021
Tools
Figma, Qualtrics, Excel
Otter.ai, Zotero
Team
Watson Hartsoe
Tommy Ottolin
Meichen Wei
Qiqi Yang
My Role
UX Designer
-
Led the design and iteration of user flows, wireframes, and prototypes
-
Designed the methods of using prototypes in user evaluations
UX Researcher
-
Conducted literature reviews and the online survey for employers.
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Did feedback sessions, stakeholder interviews, and user and heuristic evaluations with teammates
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Analyzed data and generated findings from surveys, interviews, feedback sessions, and user evaluations
Problem
In a fast-paced workplace, it is easy for conflict to be swept under the rug, but conflict has far-reaching negative effects for both individuals and organizations. There are several common reasons why conflicts are not resolved.
Lack of understanding on the other parties' opinions on conflicts
Not able to manage personal emotions and face the conflict
How might we facilitate young professionals in resolving interpersonal conflicts by encouraging sharing opinions from all parties in conflicts?
Research
Literature Review
First, we did literature reviews focusing on user group (young professionals) characteristics and user goals. This provided us with the existing findings and theories on emotion management and conflict resolution, and we proved the findings later through designs.
User Group Characteristics
1
First Career
No experience in organizational socialization
2
Fast-paced work environment
Need to quickly adapt to the constant transformations and remain competitive
3
In transitional state
Lack of instructions and feedback (work vs. school)
4
Achievement-oriented
Misunderstandings on young people perceive themselves as superior to others
User Goals
Express emotions
Project teams will obtain essential knowledge from negative emotions that are constructively expressed
Resolve conflicts
If conflicts can be approached constructively, they can increase interpersonal connections with peers.
Achieve catharsis
Reach the state of feeling relieved from the emotions by "purification of emotion"
Competitive Analysis
We researched existing products that serve the purpose of emotional management and conflict resolution. We learned and compared these products' features and user flows, which provided us with possible directions to steer the project goal towards. The following is one example of how we analyzed competitor products.
Life Sherpa
A remote work support application that assists managers and employees learn about each other's work and emotional status. It also contains self-help tools for managing emotions and stresses.
Features for Employees
Set working and emotional status
Receive customized tasks and notifications
Self-help emotional management tool
Features for Managers
Check employees' working status
Progress reports on employees' performances
Analytics on employees' strengths and weaknesses
Life Sherpa - https://lifesherpapp.com/
Online Surveys (Employee/Employer)
The goals of the surveys were to hear specific examples of conflict and to better understand how people perceive the others involved in their conflicts. There are 2 surveys, one for employees who experienced interpersonal conflicts (n = 26) and the other for managers or HR who dealt with conflicts (n = 3). Survey questions were built under 3 topics types of conflicts and resolutions, personal and other party's emotions towards conflicts, and the significance of conflicts.
We performed qualitative coding to free-form survey responses where participants described interpersonal conflict issues and how the issues were reconciled. We created categories for issues and reconciliations based on the response contents and matched responses under appropriate catgories.
The followings are findings and trends from survey results according to each topic.
Types of conflicts (top issues and common parties)
Discrimination
Unfair Treatment
Managers & Teammates
Top 3 conflict resolution methods (selected by a certain percentage of participants)
80%
Discussion with someone else
48%
Discussion with the other party
44%
Distracting yourself with other tasks
Emotions towards conflicts
60% AGREE
Had a negative impact on my work performance
68% AGREE
Had a negative impact on the relationship between the other party and me
Interviews (Users & Stakeholders)
There were 7 semi-structured interviews conducted with users and 4 structured interviews with stakeholders.
Users were recruited from online surveys, and they provided more detailed information on their conflict experiences, which helped shape common use cases and user personas. Stakeholders were people with professional experience in workplace conflict management and f behavioral sciences. We were able to refine the problem space and gained more domain knowledge by conducting Stakeholder interviews.
Research Findings
After analyzing surveys and interviews results, we generated research findings from common behaviors and issues from users. Research findings proved concepts learned from initial research and set important guidelines for comprehending emotion and conflict. Design implications were also created based on each finding.
#1
People do not have trouble recalling past experiences of interpersonal conflict at workplace.
#3
Emotions will change as time goes on, and there is much to be learned from the journey of emotions.
#5
Issue resolution is dependent on people's emotions, actions taken, and workplace policies.
#7
Emotional authentication is an essential event for resolving conflicts.
#2
Emotions are difficult to define, whether given predefined options or defined freely.
#4
Communication is the most practiced method to attempt to resolve interpersonal issues.
#6
Resolving the issue tends to resolve the emotions associated with the task-based conflict.
#8
A third party should only be incorporated after the original parties attempted to resolve the conflict.
Design
Ideations
There were 4 ideation activities that we took to break down problem space and find variations so that we can gain deeper understandings of it.
Problem: People experience ANGER through conflicts at Workplaces
Envision Your Problem as a Solution
Identify & Consider the Conditions that Render Your Problem Obsolete
anger can Motivate
anger can Attract Attention
anger can Flag Hidden Issues
It's OK to share feelings at workplace
Anger is a good quality of a worker
Everybody is angry
Slice & Dice
Manage emotion
Meditation/Reflection, Escape/leave
Resolve conflict
Meeting with HR, Talk with manager, Disiplinary actions
Vent emotion
Diary, Punch bag, Stress ball, Tissue paper
S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
S
Substitute
HR -> Artist, Therapist
Diary -> Social media
C
Combine
HR + Gym
Stress ball + Tissue
A
Alter your perspective
Escape to paradise
M
Modify
Diary with emotional management exercise
P
Put to other uses
Office for doing meditations
E
Eliminate
No meeting with HR to resolve conflicts
R
Rearrange/Reverse
Manager plans talk sessions with employee
Brainstorms
We wrote ideas under 4 topics for a 4-min brainstorming session, and the ideas are grouped and generated findings.
Issue Resolution
Emotional Management
Catharsis
Wildcard
Feedback Sessions on Design Ideas
After brainstorming, we further discussed the design ideas and matched them to all the research findings. We created wireframes from 4 ideas that had the most matches to the research findings. These feedback sessions offered us valuable insights and guidance in shaping the project scope and purpose, and also improving the usability and accessibility of design ideas based on user feedback.
We did 2 rounds of feedback sessions with 6 participants (4 potential users & 2 experts) on design ideas. For the first round, we presented the wireframes and collected feedback for all 4 ideas. 2 ideas that received more positive reviews were selected for the 2nd round of feedback session. We also built low fidelity prototypes on the 2 ideas.
Feedback session's structure
Presenter
Moderator
Notetaker
Standard questions for all ideas
Example qestions for each idea
○ What are your initial thoughts?
○ How likely are you to use this system?
- Give a rating from 1~10.
○ Do you have any concerns about using a system like this?
Thoughts on specific features
○ What kind of ribbons would you be interested in seeing or not want to see?
User types
○ Who would you feel comfortable sharing this information with?
Major concerns
○ Are you comfortable with drawing emotion/conflict out?
3 Roles in holding the session
Feedback session's results & findings
Round 1
Resilience Ribbons
This is an app for company-wide use in acknowledging workplace experiences by awarding colleagues ribbons. Users can nominate, view, upvote, or share coworkers’ ribbons provided by the app.
Findings
#1
More likely to be used by conflict-averse or introverted people
#2
Ribbons might induce inauthentic/ competitive behaviors
Round 2
Say What You See
This is an improved version of Draw It Out with a complete process of bringing two parties from having different perspectives on the conflict to making an agreement on how to resolve the conflict. An agreement of starting this activity and a receipt containing the takeaway from the conflict are included in the activity.
Draw
Compare
Outcome
Discuss