The objective of the user research is to discover individuals working from home experience, understanding their daily work tasks and working collaboration, and identify their needs and pain points.

User survey

A customer survey was conducted to obtain the insights of user behaviour and general opinion and concerns towards working from home alone. Even though small quantity of results were collected, this survey have helped to better structure and lead the user interview.

Overall insights:

• All the participants have previous experience on working from home
• To the scale of 1 to 5, all the participants rated their working from home experience 3 or less.
• The most popular pros of WFH is the flexible working hours and comfortability
• The reasons participants like about working outside is because they are around other people who are also working, followed by change of environment and potentially meeting other people
• The most common two challenges participants facing WFH is distractions and no human interactions
• The participants most commonly meet new people from work/school, and followed by friends of friends and social media
• 33.3% of the participants chose to network via social talk event online, 50% of the participants chose to network on social media, and 16.7% of the participants want to wait and meet people in real life
• The feedback obtained regarding to participants personal experiences were they would like to have someone around to work with, they would like to boost up their productivity, for some they are unable to WFH because they do not have all the technology supply needed at home

User interview

A interview was conducted to understand users needs, past experiences and expectations of working from home alone. The user interview focused on the enjoyment of working from home, and how they work collaboratively. The study helped understanding users daily work routine and problems encountered during the process. The participants were aged from 20 to 30 who are experiencing working from home alone.

Overall insights:

• All the participants were experiencing working or studying from home.
• Most of them found it difficult to balance work and life because of the flexible working hours and the fact they they would constantly forget to clock out.
• When the participants WFH, most of them do not have a very clear or regular work routine. Some have mentioned that they were likely to have short attention spans at home.
• Most the participants to some extend enjoy WFH, but they would like to improve their experiences.
• The reasons they like WFH were because of the comfortableness, time saving and flexibility. The reasons they dislike WFH were because of many distractions, no clear boundaries between work and life, feeling isolated, difficulties to connect with co-workers.