Jing Qian

Pebble is a tailor-made virtual assistant that aims to serve companies with remote working needs and improve the lives of workers. Pebble promotes happiness and productivity in the workplace by helping employees build meaningful connections, switch between work modes to better manage their work, and build healthy work habits.

We brought together 55+ key stakeholders, consisting of Wellbeing specialists, employees from apprentices all the way to the leaderships and HR, for conducting research, interviews, workshops, and prototypes. We worked closely with the VIC team, using their team as a test bench for our design.

We brought our practice of service design to positive psychology and behavioral change science to find out the effective and easy way of promoting happiness in the workplace.

By using workshops to conduct interviews, which allowed us to iterate quickly and test hypotheses while conducting in-depth research. We fully integrate users and stakeholders into the design process. Create our solution based on the results of the co-creation ideation workshop with our previous research.

Based on our extensive research and insights mentioned above, we mapped out 5 well-being personalities: the apprentices, The feelers, the explorers, the doers, and the mentors. The metrics used to create these groups are based on their motivation to work, their attitude towards wellbeing activities, and their proficiencies related to work and wellbeing activities.

The results of our metrics helped us create different pebbles based on their unique needs. Each Pebble has its unique traits and characteristics. They would act and speak differently to accompany users when they use the service.

How do they get their Pebble? We designed a quiz with 3 categories to help our platform with matchmaking and prediction of users’ personal pebble. Users will eventually get their customized pebble by answering one question per day. During this process, users would build emotional engagement with pebbles in their day-to-day conversations.

The accuracy of the well-being personality quiz got proved by the VIC team and the public. (If you are interested in finding out what personality you are, please contact us.)

1. Enable users to focus on meaningful work which promotes long-lasting happiness and productivity.

--In the deep work function, Pebble provides 1-minute cognitive fitness exercises that quickly prepare user’s minds and switch between various work modes, allowing them to better stay focused on work. And reduce the distractions caused by remote work.

2.Create the informal interactions that are needed for healthy social connection.

--By simulating real-world interaction from the office, we create a digital “Cafe” where employees can have spontaneous interaction with colleagues. They could have a 10 minutes coffee chat with their peers who are also in the Cafe during the morning and lunch break.

3. Set boundaries between work and life, building healthier working habits.

--Pebble exists in their working desktop and phone, and only appears in the work time. During the work, Pebble will nudge users to do certain activities to avoid sitting for too long.

The iteration of Pebble

To collect users' feedback about Pebble, we conducted 5 in-depth prototype sessions, using Figma to simulate real interactions with the pebble. We received feedback from entry-level through to management-level employees. In general, participants liked the sense of connection and bonding Pebble can bring into the team. They also wondered whether it would be possible to integrate Pebble into their existing office collaboration tools, like the Microsoft team or slack.

Bearing this suggestion in mind, we developed integrations for these tools and came up with several enhancements to Pebble’s main functions:

01. Add mini-games to add playful elements in the virtual cafe function;

02. Display the nice words written by colleagues during the focus exercises to spread positivity in a team;

03. Aggregate the users’ data and send it back to the company’s existing internal wellbeing programs, so they can identify and resolve wellbeing issues in the company.

The future of Pebble

We planned to retain our users from two perspectives, company and employees. We would continue to work with subscribed companies by generating regular employee wellbeing reports and recommendations for their teams and HR department. Employees would also continue to see new benefits, with personalized wellbeing reports, the ability to bring in third-party focus exercises from the likes of Headspace and NHS fitness studio and smart conversational ai capabilities that make Pebble able to help them in new ways.

Pebble creates various values for different stakeholders. It enables employees to have the focus time to do meaningful work; establish and maintain social connections with their peers. Pebble brings a healthier and productive team for team leaders and the company as a whole. Outside the organizations that directly use our service, Pebble partners with existing office collaboration tools and wellbeing programs to deliver the ultimate wellbeing-focused working environment.

A huge thank you to all the people who helped us on our project, whose participation made the whole working process really enjoyable.

To our project partners, Elin Sjursen and Annie Woodall, for their continued support and kindness.

To David Eveleigh-Evans, our project tutor, for his professional guidance and for encouraging us to try out more possibilities.

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