Research
Duration: 2 weeks
Role: Secondary research, Primary research, Journey mapping, User personas, Ideation
Tools used: Miro, Adobe Suite, Google Scholar
Inspiration
I chose to work on this topic since I was dealing with an identical problem at work. The covid-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home, raising concerns about their mental health. I was curious about how being forced to work from home affects individuals in various professions. Since I am interested in learning more about mental health, I opted to focus my research on how it affected employees emotionally.
Secondary research
Literature review
A literature review was done to gather data from existing research papers and journals on the impact of working from home on employees. This aided me in identifying the research gap and moving forward with my research.
Displayed below is the literature review conducted.
Primary Research
Process for primary research
Discussion guide
Based on the literature review, a Discussion Guide was prepared which would help me conduct interviews with participants. This discussion guide includes the areas that were found to be consistent across most academic papers and articles that affected employees' work-from-home jobs.
This helped me better understand the drawbacks of working from home, as well as acquire fresh and deeper insights into the lives of employees who were forced to work from home due to the lockdown.
Probe tool
The Probe Tool was designed in such a way (as shown on the right) that it would help me fetch data in terms of what emotions the participant went through during certain situations while working from home.
Contents of the tool:
The tool involved a set of scenarios that were compiled concerning the common situations which the working professionals experienced whilst working from home.
The tool involved a set of scenarios that were compiled concerning the common situations which the working professionals experienced whilst working from home.
For each scenario, a set of emotions were provided which the users could choose from according to what they felt during that particular scenario. I used a visual tool, ‘The Feeling Wheel’ curated by Gloria Wilcox to select the appropriate emotions.
The Emotions selected were established through the literature review conducted in the secondary research phase. The most common emotions mentioned across all papers, journals, articles etc. were noted and identified with the help of Wilcox’s feeling wheel.
The Scenarios established through the literature review conducted in the secondary research phase were situations or instances that were commonly present in all job types.
This tool was administered to the participants via ‘Google Forms as an activity to be performed immediately after the interview
Interviews
The interviews were an excellent way to gather information on the discussion guide's key points.
Following the development of the probing tool, participants for the study were chosen from a diverse range of genders, age groups, and occupations.
This would eventually aid in understanding demographic viewpoints on working from home.
Summaries of interviews
Affinity mapping
This was carried out to organize all the qualitative data into categories. It helped me understand how similar the responses were and it also helped me empathize with the participants.
Insights and design ideas through affinity mapping
The affinity mapping exercise was helpful in generating some insights, which allowed me to brainstorm potential ideas to improve the experience of an employee working from home.
Quantitative data collection
The goal is to deliver the questionnaire to suitable candidates for the quantitative research and collect data from them. This information will then be used in a process called cluster analysis to create personas for employees who work from home in India. The data generated by cluster analysis will hopefully be useful for future research.
Reflections
I learned about the various research methodologies available for gathering qualitative or quantitative data. I learnt how to conduct interviews in such a way that participants did not feel unduly conscious about their responses while yet receiving quality data.
The construction of a discussion guide during the interviews was a big bother for me during the course of my study because it needed to include themes that would provide me with insights into my area of investigation. Having a mind map of the secondary research data significantly assisted me in drafting the roadmap for discussion.
Since the duration of the entire assignment was not adequate, I was not able to conduct enough interviews which would fetch me richer data.
Also, the short period of time for the assignment did not allow me to conduct a survey for receiving quantitative data.
