# Encouraging Social Interactions in Hybrid Work

> Reconnecting hybrid teams through evidence-based social feature design.

- **Case study:** https://yazdanjoo.de/projects/deskbird-hybrid-work
- **Author:** Sanaz Yazdanjoo (UX Engineer)
- **Role:** UX Researcher (team of 6)
- **Year:** 2023–2024
- **Timeline:** 10/2023 – 03/2024
- **Status:** published
- **Context:** Industry project · deskbird
- **Summary outcome:** Socialising happens in breaks, so the concept connects colleagues by shared interest rather than by shared calendar.

Industry UX Research Project with deskbird × Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

## About

An industry UX research project with deskbird and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar on why hybrid teams lose their everyday social connection. In a team of six we ran the full user-centred design process — stakeholder interviews, a 57-person survey, and six contextual inquiries — to establish how a social feature should work before it reached the roadmap. The outcome is 'Interest-Based Communities', my concept, selected by deskbird's stakeholders and delivered as a research-backed high-fidelity prototype.

## Challenge

Hybrid work reduced spontaneous social interactions: employees felt less integrated and new joiners struggled to connect. deskbird — a B2B SaaS platform for desk booking and hybrid week planning — wanted evidence, not assumptions, on how a social feature should work before committing it to the product roadmap.

## Solution

We designed 'Interest-Based Communities': employees add interests to their profile, see colleagues' interests, and create or get invited to interest-based events. The concept connects both office-based and remote staff and was delivered as a high-fidelity prototype with development recommendations, grounded in every research finding along the way.

## Methodology

We followed the full UCD process in an industry setting. Two competitive reviews framed the scope: the hybrid-work engagement landscape (Microsoft Viva, Workvivo, Donut for Slack, Happeo, and ~25 others) to establish what a social feature could be, and deskbird's direct desk-booking competitors (Flexopus, Condeco, Deskly, Robin, Kadence, Yoffix, Seatti, and others) to establish what was already shipping. A heuristic evaluation of the existing deskbird app — walked through as both admin and end user, with user-flow analysis — mapped the product itself. A literature review of social features in workplace systems, working from Lyons and Lessard's distinction between key and supportive social features, gave the concept work a vocabulary. Stakeholder interviews across marketing, product management, product design, and customer support defined brand identity, consumer aspirations, and the social-feature scope. A ten-section online survey opening with a consent block (57 respondents, mainly aged 25–34, IT industry, hybrid workers recruited via convenience and snowball sampling) quantified work conditions, social interaction states, communication channels, and privacy preferences; it was piloted with the think-aloud method before launch, and its open-ended responses set the focus for what came next. Six 90-minute remote contextual inquiries — observing product managers, engineers, designers, and analysts in their real hybrid workday, half from home and half from the office — were each paired with a 30-minute semi-structured follow-up interview, then worked through in team interpretation sessions. Two inquiry pilots preceded the recorded sessions.

## Process

- **discover: Learning the Product and the Landscape** — Before talking to anyone we walked the existing deskbird app end to end, once as an admin and once as an end user, mapping its user flows and its existing social surface — annotating every screen against Nielsen's heuristics, colour-coded by which one was in question. In parallel we reviewed two landscapes: the engagement-platform set (Microsoft Viva Engage, Workvivo, Happeo, Haiilo, Staffbase, Donut for Slack, Sococo, Gather Town and others) and deskbird's direct desk-booking competitors (Flexopus, Deskly, Kadence, Seatti, Envoy, Yoffix and others), feature by feature.
  - Insight: Presence data was not the gap: Flexopus, Deskly, Kadence, Seatti, Envoy and Yoffix all shipped some form of colleague finder, and our own review notes deskbird had the equivalent. What none of them did was use that data to create a connection. The social layer sat on top of work as a feed, a channel, or a chat — separate from the planning flow people were already in. The opening was to build the social feature into the scheduling surface rather than beside it.
- **discover: Aligning on Scope with deskbird** — Interviews across marketing, product management, product design, and customer support surfaced three insight clusters: brand identity (minimalist, usability-driven UX), consumer aspirations (fewer clicks, no extra browser tabs), and the social-feature mandate — transparent, non-intrusive, attracting people back to the office.
  - Insight: The business goal ('attract people back to the office') and the user goal ('meaningful connection') were not the same thing — the requirements had to answer both.
- **discover: Defining What a Social Feature Meant Here** — Before scoping anything we wrote our own working definition: social features within deskbird are the functionalities that facilitate communication, collaboration, and community-building among employees in a hybrid workspace. Five candidate types sat inside it — centralised activity feeds, virtual or physical collaboration spaces, in-app messaging, customisable user profiles, and automated notifications and alerts.
  - Insight: Naming the five types made the trade-off visible. Three of them — feeds, messaging, notifications — add a channel, which ran against the stakeholder mandate for something non-intrusive and free of extra browser tabs. Customisable user profiles was the type the concept work ended up building on.
- **discover: Quantifying Hybrid Social Life (N=57)** — A ten-section instrument opening with a consent block: multiple-choice, rating, and open-ended questions across work conditions, social preferences, social interaction in work life, the role of the company, communication channels, emotional aspects, and privacy preferences. It was piloted with the think-aloud method and revised before launch. Respondents were mainly juniors aged 25–34 in the IT industry, across various company sizes. Participation was screened on currently or recently working in a hybrid setting.
  - Insight: Nearly three-quarters agreed that knowing personal details about a colleague makes them relate more — the single strongest signal pointing toward interest-based connection. Respondents were open about gender, relationship status, and birthday, but split on age, hobbies, and personal milestones, which set a boundary for what any profile could ask for.
- **discover: Observing the Hybrid Workday in Context (N=6)** — Six 90-minute remote observations of hybrid workers in their real workplace — product manager, software engineer, customer success manager, product designer, UX working student, business analyst — followed by 30-minute semi-structured interviews to clarify observations and capture desires for improvement. Participants had to be in the office at least once a week, gender was distributed evenly, and half were observed from home and half from the office so the two settings could be compared directly. Two pilots preceded the recorded sessions. The open-ended survey answers set what we went looking for: how people decide between home and office, how they feel about office events, how they connect with colleagues.
  - Insight: Breaks are when socialisation happens — and breaks at the office differ fundamentally from breaks at home. Participants wanted variety and meaningful social breaks — and to be left undisturbed when they needed focus.
- **define: Six Workdays into One Picture** — Each inquiry was worked through in a team interpretation session. Observations became numbered affinity notes tagged to the participant they came from, and each participant's workday was modelled from five angles — sequence, relationship, collaboration, identity, and physical setup. The five model types were divided across the team so that each one was built consistently across all six participants; I owned the collaboration model. The wall was then built in five passes: gather every note, group by observed pattern, write blue labels, consolidate blue into pink, and read actionable ideas off the top.
  - Insight: Six themes came out of the wall: interruption and focus, work breaks, socialising at the workplace, what drives the choice between home and office, communication habits, and bonding at work. Because every note stayed tagged to its participant, any requirement could be walked back to the observation behind it.
- **define: From Findings to Requirement Categories** — Findings were synthesised into functional, environmental, user, and data requirements: foster interaction across seniority levels and around shared interests, integrate seamlessly on every platform, stay accessible to both remote and on-site staff, stay intuitive for all users, and collect data privacy-first. Each entry carried the interview or exploration it came from, and the matrix went through a second pass after critique — one round mixed ideas in with requirements, and those were pulled back out into the ideation phase where they belonged.
  - Insight: Interaction between different seniority levels and departments was where connecting stayed hardest — any concept had to lower that threshold, not just add another chat channel. The questions the matrix could not answer became three scoped follow-up studies: social interaction at the workplace, privacy preferences around social data, and communication channels.
- **design: Three Concepts, One Winner** — Each of the three affinity sections was taken through visioning and then into concepts, and the pooled results were consolidated into five directions: efficient and engaging communication, interest-based events and social networking, personalised and optimised breaks, intelligent notifications and alerts, and well-being and productivity. Each direction was owned by one team member, who took it through a concept pack — background verbatims, a jobs-to-be-done statement, target users, target companies, a concept-level competitor review, a feature MVP breakdown, and a storyboard — and defended it in a review round where every concept received written feedback and a clarity check. Interest-based events and social networking was mine. Narrowing five to three was a scoping decision made in a brainstorming session as the project neared its end, not a scored comparison: personalised breaks and well-being overlapped enough to be merged by their owners into Flows & Breaks, intelligent notifications was dropped by group consensus, and the remaining three went to deskbird's stakeholders as Chat2Meet, Flows & Breaks, and Interest-Based Communities.
  - Insight: My first storyboard proposed a matching mechanic: the system compares two profiles for shared interests and announces a match. A reviewer's note on the board read "not too much dating up", and the concern held — an interest feature that reads as a dating app is not something people will put a real hobby into at work. The matching mechanic was cut and the concept kept the parts that survived scrutiny: interests on the profile, colleagues' interests visible, and events built from what people already share. Groups, channels, buddy matching, and in-app calling all went with it.
- **design: Slicing the Concept into Three Releases** — The selected concept was mapped as a user story map across four epics — customising the profile, managing interests as admin, creating events as admin, and connecting users — sliced into three releases. User flows were drawn for the first release covering three paths: the end user selecting interests, a second user viewing someone's profile, and the admin creating a tagged event with its invitation and notification logic.
  - Insight: Privacy was scoped into the first release rather than deferred — interest visibility could be switched off at the profile level from the start, with finer per-interest controls held back for release three. That sequencing came straight out of the survey's split reaction to sharing personal details.
- **deliver: Interest-Based Communities Prototype** — Final prototype: add your own interests, see colleagues' interests, get invited to events, and create events for like-minded people — accessible to both remote and on-site staff, and extended into the Slack side panel so it did not become another browser tab. Adding interests runs as a three-step flow — an onboarding prompt, a picker showing how many colleagues share each interest, and a confirmation that explains what changes as a result. Event creation lets an organiser choose invitees by name or team, by interest, or all employees, and the events list splits into all events and my interests events with RSVP counts on each. Validated in user testing sessions (feature understanding, usability issues), iteratively refined, and delivered to deskbird with documentation and development recommendations.
  - Insight: Success indicators were defined up front and written to fit deskbird's own feature-launch process, which included a metric-definition step: number of interests created, profiles with interests, interest-based events, and attendees — making the feature's impact measurable post-launch.

## Results

Socialisation happens during breaks, and office breaks differ fundamentally from home-office breaks; the office is preferred for real interactions and faster communication while home office wins on convenience and fewer distractions; and nearly three-quarters of survey respondents agreed that knowing personal details about a colleague makes them relate more. Interaction across seniority levels and departments emerged as a persistent barrier. These findings shaped three competing concepts (Chat2Meet, Flows & Breaks, Interest-Based Communities); Interest-Based Communities was selected, refined into the final prototype, and validated in user testing sessions that returned positive feedback on usability and feature understanding.

## Limitations

- Survey respondents were recruited by convenience and snowball sampling, which biases the sample toward the team's own networks.
- Roughly three-quarters of respondents were aged 25–34 and about two-thirds worked in technology, so the sample under-represents deskbird's wider enterprise customer base.
- All six contextual inquiry participants worked in the IT industry, so the observed workday patterns are specific to that setting.
- Usability testing validated feature understanding and interaction, not adoption or effect on actual social connection — that would need a longitudinal study after launch.
- Two of the five planned study areas — emotional aspects of hybrid work, and social events and team building — were not run. Those questions were answered from survey responses alone rather than from dedicated study.

## Key Numbers

- **57** — survey respondents
- **6** — contextual inquiries + follow-ups
- **~75%** — say they relate more to colleagues whose personal details they know
- **3 → 1** — concepts presented to deskbird; one selected by vote

## Outcome

At the final presentation, deskbird's stakeholders said they liked the concept and intended to build it in upcoming sprints. That is a stated intention recorded at handover — not confirmed delivery. The research team had no visibility into deskbird's backlog after the project ended, and I have not since verified whether the feature shipped. It is listed here as unconfirmed rather than claimed as adoption.

## Methods

- Heuristic Evaluation (admin & end user)
- Competitive & State-of-the-Art Review
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Online Survey
- Pilot Studies (think-aloud survey pilot, two contextual inquiry pilots)
- Remote Contextual Inquiry (90 min)
- Semi-structured Follow-up Interviews (30 min)
- Interpretation Sessions & Contextual Design Models
- Affinity Diagramming
- Requirements Engineering
- User Story Mapping & Release Planning
- Concept Development & Prototyping
- Usability Testing & Iteration

## Tech Stack

- Figma
- FigJam
- Online Survey Tools

## Skills & Topics

User-Centered Design · Mixed-Methods Research · Stakeholder Interviews · Contextual Inquiry · Survey Design · Competitive Analysis · Affinity Diagramming · Requirements Engineering · Concept Development · Interaction Design · High-Fidelity Prototyping · Usability Testing · Figma · B2B SaaS