Fuze: Office Communication
Employee satisfaction with the modern day office is decreasing due to problems with interdepartmental communication and interactivity. While technology is advancing employees still find themselves struggling with simplest tasks. Communication and interaction amongst co-workers are key to flourish culture, efficiency and creativity and sustain a common understanding around company goals.
A system that consists of a Talk App, a physical Fuze Hub, Persistent Desktop, and Fuze Assistant. All combined will help improve communication and productivity in office environments.
Office communication is one of the most underrated factors to drive company efficiency and culture. For so long people have been going into the office to work together, collaborate and support each other on common goals. However, the market is fragmented and there is a great amount of tools out there which supposed to drive efficiency but often make things more complex.
Fuze is a system which focuses on communication and interactivity in office settings. Its goal is to merge the digital and physical world and make communicating in and away from the office easier. It implies the Fuze Talk App with a very basic integration with the Fuze Assistant app, Fuze Hub and Persistent Desktop ideas.
Throughout field research we've noticed how versatile an "office" can be. We've seen people in cafés, libraries, restaurants, small office rooms, big office rooms, meeting rooms, open plan office or in silos. We also observed people standing, talking, and laying while working and noticed other phenomena such as spreading out paper work across a whole table, pinning things to a wall, taking pictures of documents and much more. Most people enjoyed working in bigger spaces with natural light and windows close by. Finally we've identified two styles of working: at a workstation and mobile.
We identified one key flow within the office environment that seemed to have the most frictions but also the most opportunities. The user journey of setting up a meeting, being in the meeting, and concluding a meeting is often more difficult than it should be. Mapping out the journey helped us to identify and visualize key frictions, but also opportunities while showing the emotional journey someone might experience.
An office environment translates into a constant flow of information. This includes sharing, communication and the misery of finding rooms, staying connected or being on the "same page". There are three main areas Fuze focuses on to tackle office communication and productivity.
The Talk app is used for all types of communication throughout the office. It includes face-to-face communication and is the main portion of this concept. The Fuze Talk App is a text, email, and in person hybrid system which interacts fluently with all the other components
This is the main page which shows the user all of the people they've talked to. Just like their texts, it is organized by most recent chats.
Once the user taps on a person in their company, all of the conversations they had with that individual will appear. This is to better reflect how we remember face-to-face conversations.
By holding down on the send button, the user can send a message with varying degrees of priority level. Low priority won’t notify the other person until they open the app, high priority will notify them even if they’re marked as busy, and confidential will notify the other person but won’t show a preview of the message as well as require a password to open the message.
Tapping on the info icon will allow the user to alter chat settings or bring up the profiles of the people in the chat. Profiles show them if someone is available, where they’re working, what their contact info is, and what projects they’re associated with. When adding people to a chat, Fuze will sort people in the office by their department.
The team can have several different conversations and because they can set different notification settings for each thread, the user won’t face another notification overload.
The Assistant offers the user intelligent and contextual prompts based on the current conversation. The user can easily swipe them away or interact with them. It can plug in to their office database to offer you information relevant to your projects, files on your desktop, or meetings the user may have coming up.
With the same gesture, the user can also send files to someone and have them select which one they like or are talking about. The user can have someone select either one, or multiple files out of a group for specificity. Finally they can also send files the traditional way, without any fancy bells or whistles.
If the user swipes down on any of the chat pages, they’ll see a handy search box to help the user find what they looking for. Based on user testing feedback, we added a quick toggle to set their availability in case the user doesn't want to be bothered.
The Hub is the easiest way to interact with the assistant. Through the hubs you can ask requests of the assistant, sign into the office, reserve rooms, track in person conversations, and much more. The black Hubs are permanently fixed to the wall while the white Hubs can be stuck onto any flat surface of any material. The Hub can also be used as a way to track in-person conversations and add them to the Fuze Talk app. It helps merge the physical with the digital world.
At the heart of the system is the Fuze Assistant. It can book rooms for you, tell you where someone is, schedule appointments for you, help with project management and so much more. It is your digital assistant in the office
The persistent desktop allows a user to pick up wherever they left off. For example, if someone in the office was preparing a presentation for later that day, they could log of their current computer with the presentation opened and ready to go, travel to the meeting room, log in, and have the presentation pop back up in the same place they had left it.
