What can offices teach us about togetherness for remote groups?
Posted by Mathieu Triay on
Last year we published a white paper on what we call the Remote Interaction Guidelines (RIG), a set of design patterns any team can use to create multiplayer applications promoting togetherness, social connection and engagement.
We wanted to see how the guidelines performed in a radically different environment than the one they were initially created for. So we decided to look at asynchronous large groups: groups of 30 to 60 people who work together but aren't necessarily in the same place at the same time. The objective is to make users feel connected to others in their team even if they don’t work or talk with them on a regular basis.
To do this, the guidelines recommend to use a single shared space where you can see everyone and what they’re doing. Unfortunately this breaks down when working asynchronously on top of being difficult to do at scale.
In offices, teams get clues about what happened in their absence by noticing physical changes in their environment (whiteboard scribbled on, papers on a desk, sticky notes on a wall, etc.). That's because they inhabit their space in time. So we decided to adapt our guideline by taking a cue from real world offices and adding a time dimension.
To try it out we built a new prototype called Colab, a shared working space composed of collaborative whiteboards. In Colab, users share a space which records past activity for future users. We call this shared history (in addition to shared space). You can also .
We tested the prototype internally with 4 teams and we were able to broadly confirm the positive impact of the modified guidelines and extend their usefulness to a wider range of application.
You can learn more about Colab and our research on the where we've also to take into account our new findings. We’ve also designed a short creative exercise that teams can do to understand how they can be applied to their work. You can read more and download the PDF template for the exercise .