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Visualizing the organization’s well-being data to increase awareness of experienced stress and reasons for it.

Summer / Autumn 2021

Tutor: Julia Kantorovitch / VTT

My role was to concept the application and make an interactive prototype with Figma.

The work was part of the Mad@Work project funded by Business Finland.

Organization Barometer

Mental well-being and stress are nowadays a big concern especially in among knowledge workers. The Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT) has been developing novel ways for workplaces to continuously measure employees’ stress in the context of knowledge work.

Organization Barometer is a tool used to visualize the current state of employees’ well-being helping teams to intervene in well-being issues before they escalate. Also, the tool aims to help not only organizations to take action, but also personal development and self-knowledge.

Brief: How to visualize the measure well-being data so that employees, team leads and companies are able to take impactful actions towards better well-being in knowledge work?

Visual metaphors

Prior research shows good results in implementing metaphors in information visualization. It may increase cognitive fluency of the visualization and motivation. Therefore, this project focused on investigating:

  1. How visual metaphors could be implemented in presenting well-being data?
  2. Which effects it might have on the user experience?

The design process had two main phases in which the target group was involved: first in defining the suitable metaphor and the context, then evaluating the designed concept.

User study

There was one task for each day in the probe kit.

Design probes

Design probes were used to understand the target group’s working environment, their experiences of stress at work as well as perceptions of initial visual metaphors that might be utilized in the Organization Barometer.

The probe kit consisted of four envelopes with survey-like task papers. After doing all the tasks, participants returned the papers after which there was an interview.

Eight knowledge workers from different fields were participated in the probe study.

Personas

Based on the probe study, two user personas were created to present the results. The personas share insights of the target group’s daily working life and environment, experiences of stress and personalities.

UX Goals

Three experience goals were defined based on user research: calmness, relatedness and transparency. The goals were used to guide design decisions made in the concept.

Transparency: Users should feel that the system has an effect, and each employee is taken seriously. This is supported by constantly updating the view in which each answer is visualized instead of aggregating data into bigger groups.

“I don’t know how exactly you can measure well-being anyways. So maybe it’s good if it would be quite vague.” (P4)

Visual metaphors

Five initial metaphors which could be used to visualize the stress and well-being data were evaluated in the probe study: hill, sky, barometer, flower field and pressure/burst.

The sky was considered the most suitable metaphor by most of the participants due to its calmness and vagueness. Several participants considered seeing exact numbers of how many people are feeling stressed, even increasing stress.

Initial concept and evaluation

The future direction for data collection.

Data

The aim of the research team is to develop unobtrusive ways to detect stress, using computer sensors following the use of computers. As the AI is still under development, the emotions are currently measured with a survey filled out three times a week.

The survey measures experienced emotions, productivity and content of the work. In addition, users can mark if they have learned something new, and reasons for the emotions.

Interface

To make the software and survey part of knowledge workers’ daily life, the concept included a desktop widget. It makes well-being visible all the time, as a desktop is mainly used by the target group.

From the widget, users can open the application with more views and a survey. The barometer itself has three dashboards: personal, team and organizational. They present different insights from the data collected with different accuracy to ensure privacy.

Visualization

The design of the interface was inspired by weather phenomena and elements appearing in the sky.

Evaluation

The visualization of emotions was evaluated with an online survey. The survey asked participants to compare metaphorical and non-metaphorical presentations of the same desktop widget presenting their team’s emotions. The shortened Attrakdiff survey was utilized to compare experiences.

Based on the results, metaphorical visualization made the visualization more attractive in the hedonic qualities but lacked pragmatic qualities such as clarity and practicality.

The open answers also pointed out to main areas to develop in the final design:

  1. The visualization should not look too much likes a weather forecast.
  2. Ability to see the exact numbers behind the visual cues.

Final design

The final concept of the Organization Barometer has several functionalities, views and information visualization.

The main element is a visualization of emotions, as it is considered the main implication in understanding the state of well-being.

The blurry weather visualization aims to indicate but not too clearly state the level of stress experienced in the organization so that it won’t increase the stress even more if the situation looks bad.

Emotions are visualized in the desktop widget. The visual elements sun, clouds and sky color have different meanings (positive, stress and calm) and they change size according to the data.

Filling the survey

Three dashboards

Demonstration of the personal dashboard. In addition, the concept includes team and organization dashboards.

Thesis “Visual Metaphors for Workplace Well-Being: Design of an Experience-Driven Information Visualization”

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