Spatial socialising for remote teams
With the future of work going remote, everyone was busy building tools to make ‘work’ better. But what about everything else? What about casual chats, coffee breaks, and game sessions with the team? With Thursday, we tried solving for the parts of remote work that no one was solving for. Making remote work socialising 10x better!
Lounge inside Thursday is a social space for teams working remotely to spend sync time together, chilling, talking, and playing mini-games. Everything but work.
(YOU CAN ALSO READ THROUGH THE BOLDS)
Remote sucks (kinda)
It comes as no surprise that, as great as it is and has its advantages, remote work is exhausting, and downright boring compared to working in an office. During the pandemic, the disadvantages were exaggerated. People were forced, unwillingly locked into their homes with connection to the outside world. It took a hit, on productivity, collaboration, and work. We had no choice but to do what was healthy for everyone: stay locked up.
But the pandemic is still here as of this writing, and offices started considering remote as a noteworthy candidate for the default mode of work, adapting to survive. Soon enough, it became clear that remote work is here to stay. Once people had their work environment set up and their schedules adjusted to how their bodies function, it was game over. No one wants to commute for 2 hours, to work in a distracting office with bad coffee (we want to brew our own coffee). The great resignation occurred.
All this while, the tech industry got busy making remote work better. Collaboration? Welcome to FigJam, Miro, Mural, InVision, Whimsical, and even Apple’s very own app for white-boarding. Video conferencing? Google Meet, Zoom, Around, Microsoft Teams. Documentation? Google Docs, Notion, Craft, Coda. You get the point; it had been over a year since the pandemic started, and there were a plethora of options to improve remote work. But things were not working. There was a missing puzzle piece, and the workers were still unhappy.
Source: The Truman Show
Remote work might suck, but is it just because of our current situation with bad tooling? And not just tools; our whole world has been designed around the idea of a working model of an office: roads, infrastructure, timings.
Steve Jobs in his home office
We now have good tools available to do our work remotely, but we left out one important aspect of work: socializing. Work plays an integral role in our modern lives, and rightly so. If we spend half of our waking life around the people we work with, it was only natural for socializing to become a significant part of the work we do. We’re social creatures. But the pandemic made it all vanish. We are no longer socializing in the workplace, other than the occasional fun friday zoom calls every team started doing. Replacing our real-life socializing, which is multifaceted and layered, it’s how we move around the office, and talk with people individually (or in small groups) with a catchall group video call of 50 people is plain wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Zoom is a great product (with its design caveats). It replaces in-office meeting and conference rooms. But we started doing all kinds of things on Zoom that it wasn’t designed to handle well. Zoom isn’t built for remote work and a collaborative environment. It is not for 1-on-1s, design reviews, socializing! If you look at the essence of the product, Zoom isn’t that different from Skype from 20 years ago. The same disembodied heads, exhausting talks, awkward silences, and grid-based structure.
While we removed meeting rooms with Zoom, emails with Slack, and our whiteboards with FigJam, no one replaced our communal and social space: our game room, kitchen refrigerator, bookshelf, coffee table, and lounge.
where is the goddamn watercooler?!
At a surface level, one might think that we have all this in our homes now, but these spaces didn’t just serve a utilitarian function. They created room for spontaneity and space for relationships to flourish. With these spaces missing, remote work would remain boring and an uninspiring mode to work in.
Creating a digital (social) space
With this hollowed-out feeling left by remote work, we started thinking about this problem space more deeply. We wanted to create a social space for remote teams, one that tries to accommodate the communal space of an office.
We knew existing tools being used by teams, like Zoom, lacked spatiality. They felt confined, rigid, and stuck.
Once inside, you’re stuck in your box. The only way to express and emote is through your face, and to take in your team members’ expressions, you have to look at a dozen faces together at a time. This is stimulus spillover—too much information being sent by one medium. Unlike the real-world, where your vision is fixated on one face at a time. Even audio is awkward. The hmms and ahs are muted by noise reduction, awkward silences are frequent and uncomfortable when looking at many faces. There is chat, but that has too much friction—not only in the way of accessing it to type your message, but also in thinking about what to type. There will be a history of what you say (unlike in real life), which adds social pressure. On Zoom, your disembodied faces lack your body language, the way your hands are moving, the knuckle cracks, and the changing of legs being crossed.
conclusion: zooom sucks!
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Zoom
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Gather town
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Thursday
There are new-age tools focused on remote socializing. They've realized the need for spatiality in digital interfaces, like the major hit, gather.town. I think they’re doing a great job of giving users a multitude of ways to express themselves: audio, video, non-traditional chat, and body language in the form of your avatar walking across the room. They took the real-world metaphors to an extreme (spatial skeuomorphism?). But the problem with such one-to-one metaphors is that they grow old quickly as users learn them, and they can become intrusive with a lot of friction. To express excitement, I have to move my character across the room up and down with my keyboard. This is exciting at first, but the friction quickly outgrows the novelty.
Real-world metaphors are great, but software should be fast. It should not get in our way. Rather than us doing the work for it, it should do the work for us.
Usercard
We found a balance between intuitiveness, spatiality, and speed in the form of Usercards inside a space confined by walls. Inspired by the live cursors of collaborative tools, but giving it more weight. Usercard is a real-life metaphor for you, in the form of an interface representation of a card. You’re your card, your card is you. To express, you move yourself. To express in Lounge, you move your card. It is all controlled by your cursor, which moves at the speed of your thought. You don’t need to translate your thoughts into ←→←→ keys like in gather.town or wait for your teammate to stop speaking before you can express them like in zoom. You just turn your User card into a quick chat box to talk without waiting or interrupting someone who is speaking.
Illustration by Javier Jaén
CHAPTER 4 - CREATION
Letting go of video (and other interface decisions)
With this simple material (the Usercard), we set out to design a space for remote teams to socialize together. We contemplated every detail, starting with something as simple as the color of our walls. T walls aren’t pure white in real life.
what could the wall of lounge feel like?
Zoom is optimized for an always-on video experience, which is not the answer for long-form socializing. This is why video is a second-class citizen in Lounge. Audio first always for larger group gatherings, and a Stage for when you need to show your pearly whites. On stage, you talk and focus on one (or a few) videos at a time, not 20 faces staring into the nothingness.
Audio (and video) isn’t the only way to express. A quick chat is always available to pass a comment while someone is on the stage talking. It is effortless, available with a single click and without any pressure, as it is all in the moment, like having a casual chat in real life. There are reactions for the more frequently occurring expressions.
Limited space, like in your office, doesn't have a room that works well for both 2 and 200 people at the same time. Digital tools can stretch their capabilities, but not to such an extent. Zoom does not work for both 2 and 200. This is why Lounge is designed to work well for 5-50 people. Muse, a spatial thinking canvas, was a major, might I say, *muse* for this concept. Unlike other canvases, Muse has limitations not imposed because of technical constraints, but to represent the offline limitations you would face on your desk or whiteboard.
The easiest, natural way to express is through moving your cursor (and hence Usercard). Whether it be a decision, excitement, or just following another teammate sillily.
Validating our hypothesis
Lounge is one of its kind product built from scratch. And all these micro and macro decisions remain a hypotheses until validated, which is why we built and launched Thursday (with Lounge) at the end of October, three months after the initial research started. We launched on Product Hunt, and it gathered a lot of attention; we were the #2 product of the day, nominated as the finalists for Dolden Kitty Awards, and received over 1,200 upvotes.
Twitter love
“ A lot of tools have tried to create the energy that Thursday has, but I don't think that anyone has come close to what Thursday is doing. ”
With the whole world going remote, there was a huge gap between our expectations out of work and the currently available tools for making remote work great.
Remote work, despite its advantages, was not very social. Work and culture took a strong hit.
While the whole world got busy building remote “work” better (think Zoom for video conferencing, FigJam for whiteboarding, Slack for communication), n one was building to make socializing better for remote teams.
Zoom was used for every face-to-face interaction, even if it wasn’t designed to handle it. It became exhausting, awkward, and unintuitive to socialize on Zoom. The spontaneity was missing, our shared spaces for relationships to flourish were taken away.
We dove deeper into the problem space, creating a social space for remote teams that is specifically designed for the task.
Current tools, like Zoom were too rigid. New-age tools like gather.town were fun and spatial, built on real-world metaphors, but became exhausting after a point. Software needs to be fast and unobtrusive.
Balancing intuitiveness, spatiality and speed, we came up with Usercards—a real-life metaphor for you, controlled by your cursor and confined inside the walls of the lounge.
Simple decisions like the color of the walls were contemplated on. Other interface decisions included going audio-first to reduce congnitive load, with the option to get on stage for some face time. Quick chat and reactions as added mediums of expression. The Usercard serves as the easiest mode to express quick gestures like (dis)agreements, excitement etc.
Launched and built within 3 months to quickly validate the idea. Became the Product Hunt – Product of the Year Award finalists. Lots of love and admiration for the design.
NO SIGNUP REQUIRED
Product
Writing
Lounge is a space for remote teams to socialise. It’s a part of Thursday.
I was the founding designer at Thursday, leading the product and brand design.
Nothing specific, over the years my process has boiled down to two simple steps.
1. Collect: Problems, ideas, user feedback, internet browsing, inspiration, thoughts.
2. Create: Wireframes, sketchnotes, instant ramen, interfaces, prototypes, visuals.
This runs in a cyclic manner until the result is desirable or I run out of coffee.
It started off as a part of folly.systems, a product and startup studio where we wanted to scratch our own itch at making remote better. And with the amazing response we got, we are now fully focused on building Thursday.
