Partopia, the word is a compound of Party, Participant, and Utopia, offers services that organize hybrid activities for small teams. Various games are designed to connect people across screens and improve the experience of hybrid events.

MY ROLE

TEAM

PROJECT

TIMELINE

Semi-structured interview
Ideation
User interface design
Prototype tests

Adaeze Chukwu
Jinyu Wu
Rahmat Raji

Service design
Experience design
Master course project

5 weeks

Enhance "experiencing" experience
in hybrid events

Although the pandemic influence is fading, some people still taking remote working models while some rush into offices to enjoy talking to a real person.
‍Hybrid working become a new normal.

We noticed that attendees in hybrid events always feel isolated and do not get engaged much. We would like to bring participants back to the hybrid activities and enhance engagement and interactions among all participants. To fulfill the needs, Partopia provides spontaneous games that can be played in hybrid events. all participants can join on phone and watch others playing on a share screen.

Key Features

Activities embrace interactions
across screens.

Partopia provides various activities to fit into your team's event. The activities are perfectly designed for hybrid team gatherings. Participants joining both online and in-site will have a seamless interaction and the most engaging experience.

Pairing online and on-site participants in FUN

Partopia can pair or group participants who join online and on-site. No worries about online participants feeling isolated and dropping off early.

All attendees
have a role to enjoy

Partopia integrates with video conference programs. When a game is playing on the phone, other participants can enjoy the game as well.

Problem

What I concerned

In a hybrid event, it is hard to bring online "name-tags" to interact with on-site crews.

Design Challenge

What I struggled with

How might we enhance the engagement of virtual participants in hybrid events?

Remote participants feel a lack of connection and engagement because they don’t have the same experience as those physically in the room, which is from a direct first-person view but rather through a screen. This results in the inability to establish a sense of connectedness with the experience.

Solution

What I designed

Collaborative Gamification embrace online participants.

Partopia provides gamification activities for hybrid events to establish connectedness between remote participants and physical attendees. A good party experience is built on engaging participants by playing designed gamified activities so that online participants could have an experience as sane as what the physical attendees have.

Literature Review

How is remote employees' experience when WFH?

Remote workers feel less connection with co-workers.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/02/16/covid-19-pandemic-continues-to-reshape-work-in-america/

Semi-structured Interview

How do participants experience hybrid parties/events?

I led 5 semi-structured interviews. I interviewed hosts and participants who had the experience of hybrid parties to understand their experience of hosting/participating in a hybrid event/party.

We also attended as guests (online or in-person) and observed two parties that were hosted by our friends. As called "flying on the wall", the purpose of this research method is to observe and experience the feelings at the moment and find more details.

Findings & Insights

01 Included & Connected

A virtual attendee feels like a spectator rather than a participant in an event.

“People who joined remotely kept dropping out of the call and my guess is because they couldn’t follow along with our games.” -- P1

02 Sharing Memories

Attendees and hosts treasure memory sharing as the most important part of an event.

“The memorable moment was taking pictures with all the friends who came to the party.” -- P2

03 Socializing

People have a social purpose in attending an event/party.

“People connecting and celebrating is more important.” -- P3

Personas

A manager and a remote employee

Hence we decided to focus on creating connectedness in hybrid events in the workplace, our stakeholders focus on team managers who usually plan a team event and remote employees. The first personas are Sarah, a team manager who is planning a welcoming party for Tumi, the second persona, who recently join in Sarah's team and works remotely.

ideation

How do an event encourage participants to join more actively？

The team ideates 20 ideas in different aspects of party experiences. Affinity mapping helps to group ideas in different themes and potential needs of users. We down-select ideas by feasibility and ingenuity.

Down-selection

An end-to-end shippable service:

We made an assumption that shipping the same kit to all participants and asking them to join the same activity will create a shared experience. The initial idea covers three stakeholders: a manager as the event planner, an employee who joins remotely, and an attendee in the office. We focused on finding more activities that can use physical props, such as wine tasting, color filling, and magic cubes. And we also focus on the service flow to make a smooth and simple PLAN_DELIVER_PLAY service process.

User
Journey

Plan

Deliver

Play

Prototyping

A Role-Playing Prototype Test

I led the prototyping test. Participants were invited to join a painting activity with role-playing in a hybrid team bonding respectively being an HR manager as a planner, a physical attendee, and a remote employee.

PIvot

The assumption of sharing experience by physical props is wrong. Sharing the same physical material does create a synchronous experience but not connectedness or interaction.

Synchronous but individual experience does not create connectedness. The participant still felt isolated and was not engaged at all.

"I was focusing on my own drawing and had no time to talk with people joining online " -- P2

More interactive moments across the screen are needed.

I don't think this game allowed me to connect with the participants crossing the screen" -- P3

Iteration

An interactive gamification experience

We refined our design goal to encourage participants to interact across the screen to build more connectedness, which makes remote attendees more engaged in an activity. We narrowed down the service of an end-to-end event to a gamification experience.

We pivoted from having generic activity recommendations to developing activities that were interactive for both online and physical participants.

Create interactions across screens

Final Design

Collaborative games create interaction

The final design focuses on crafting collaborative opportunities for employees to perform an activity in teams. For example, a "Pic-it" game asks two participants to find and capture items to describe an assigned word.

Paired participants play the game on the app on the phone.

The game will go group by group, and the whole process is showing on shared screens with a plug-in that Partopia integrates with video conference programs.

Take Away

Testing the assumption finds the "be-goal".

Our initial idea was built on the assumption that acting on the same activity could create a shared experience among participants, while we ignored the key element of the connection is interactive participation. The "be-goal" of user experience is getting participants to interact with others. We are glad that we tested our idea at the very beginning and found the right direction.

Interaction cross the screen is hard.