EniWhere

Role: UX Designer. Project carried out in collaboration with Eni, Milan.

SOLUTION STATEMENT

PROBLEM STATEMENT

To allow employees to build their schedule to enjoy working from different locations.

Design a service that enhances the employee’s experience in a concept of new hybrid workplace.

UNDERSTANDING USERS

***Employee quotes about work habits and time management***

Our user interviews quickly pointed to time ownership issues for the employees. They are booked in meetings all day and need to carve out time for individual tasks. Since there are no restrictions on meeting time, employees often find themselves in irrelevant meetings. Finally, the system does not prevent overlapping meetings and employees find themselves having to deal with attending 2 meetings at the same time.

Time spent in meetings per day — ***Employee time spent in meetings per day***

We also used quantitative data to confirm our interview findings. This bar chart shows that the majority of employees spend 7 hours a day in meetings and 1 hour per day on individual work. We used surveys to ensure our solution works for all Eni employees, not just the ones we interviewed.

PAIN POINTS

Carved out time for individual tasks.
Irrelevant meetings
Overlapping meetings

DISRUPTING THE SCENARIO

Embed Block

Add an embed URL or code. Learn more

SOLUTION

Shared Hours

Each employee publishes the time they want to use for meetings or communication with colleagues quarterly: these are called shared hours.
Shared hours take 3-4 hours daily.
During your shared time, your availability status and location is shared with coworkers

Time Ownership

Meetings and quick questions can only be scheduled during shared hours.
For the rest of the work hours, employees are “off the grid”. Availability status or location is not displayed to coworkers.

SOLUTION part 2.

Breaking the monotony

The solution offers employees different options for places to work. This breaks the monotony that was noticed throughout the work from home period and does not force employees back into lenghty commutes to gain the community of the office.

Stimulating Milanese Economy

Many Milanese businesses suffered throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Encouraging employees to work at cafes, bars and libraries throughout the city augments consumption and purchasing in these establishments.

PROCESS

USING A METAPHOR TO REFRAME OUR PROBLEM

Following our user interviews, we noticed in addition to the problem posed by Eni, many other issues were pointed out by employees. In order to create a service which encapsulate all the main insights, we used a metaphor to reframe our design problem.

Why the fridge?

Workplaces include interactions like:

Fridges include interactions like:

Working together
Taking people’s time in their schedule through meetings and interactions. Reserving time for oneself to work on personal tasks.
Boundaries to delimitate personal time and meeting time in order to ensure employees are not over worked.

Cookin together
Ability to add and remove ingredients
Ground rules to have ingredients for personal and shared recipes to ensure user wellbeing

From these attributes, we dug deeper and developed this metaphor by thinking of containers as places and ingredients as tasks.

Homes are the egg basket. You’re familiar with your set up and you know exactly what you’re going to get. This doesn’t mean you’re doing the same thing every day. One day it might be an omelet or one day you might bake a cake. The point is: the egg basket is a predictable place with no surprises.

The coffee shop is the cheese container. In a shared fridge, it’s a place where you’re often surprised by your flatmates’ taste. Cheese can be eaten as a quick meal or shared as an extravagant cheese platter. Just like the coffee shop, where both independent and group work can take place.

The Eni office is the meat drawer. You don’t roast a whole turkey for a quick Tuesday lunch. Like your grandma cooking a whole ham for Christmas, the meat drawer is a symbolic place that represents important gatherings. Similarly, the Eni office is where you will sign important contracts, listen to important presentations and bring important clients. It’s a symbol of importance.

COMMUNICATING WITH THE TEAM ONLINE

This project was created in collaboration with four fellow UX designers from Politecnico di Milano. It was created entirely remotely using Miro, Figma, and Google Drive to share work and Mircrosoft Teams to schedule interviews. Here are some snapshots of the Miro board used, for the full board please head to this link.