Thursday
Building a social platform for remote teams to build strong culture
Details
With the future of work going remote, everyone was busy building tools to make ‘work’ better. But what about everything else? Casual chats, coffee breaks, and game sessions with the team? With Thursday, we tried to solve the parts of remote work that no one was addressing: remote work socializing.
My role involved leading product and brand design, working with a small team of founders, researchers, and engineers to build Thursday 0->1.
Role
Research, Brand, Product, Design
Team
Timeline
2021-2023
Links
Goal
1
Figure out the shortcomings of current remote work scenarios.
Research
User interviews
Market analysis
2
Synthesise the research into a product opportunity.
Personas
Brainstorm
Technology
3
Build a tool for remote teams that they love to use.
Brand
Product
Interface
Remote work
What is going on in the world of remote work?
While remote work made us more productive, we were experiencing a decline in workforce morale, evident in the Great Resignation. To dig deeper, we conducted over 25 interviews with remote workers in the tech industry:
Startups
Corporates
Managers
Individual Contributers
Founders
25+ interviews
Findings
•
Using tools not built for socializing led to unsatisfactory results.
•
Inorganic conversations, such as those in an online video conferencing tool, are not good for socializing.
•
It is hard for organizers (HR, founders, managers) to manage hosting socials along with their core responsibilities.
Synthesizing the research
Knowing our users
Based on our research, we had two main users: Employees and Organizers, and one secondary user: Management.
We focused on our primary user personas, building the best experience for them to engage, connect, and socialize in a remote workplace, and making it easier for teams to host these.
Getting feedback
Understanding who we’re building for is the most important step. We tracked our user experience, asking for feedback from employees (directly) as we were building. Heck, we even did a pre-alpha launch publicly where anyone who came across our tweet could join our very first social and give us feedback on the very early product iteration.
Rethinking remote socials
With all the user research and meta-analysis, we started thinking of ideas for our product. We took every problem we discovered and brainstormed how we could solve it.
Brainstorming ideas for improving every aspect of a remote social
With these ideas, we prototyped a lot. From Figma prototypes to wizard-of-Oz-esque trials of our concepts, where we emulated our idea using existing products, we iterated our way through to build Thursday, launching our beta in under three months and continuously improving it thereafter.
We discovered two major themes: socializing happens better in smaller groups (similar to real life), so we wanted to break big groups into smaller, more engaged ones. However, breaking groups up without them meeting all together did not fit well with how teams usually engage; they needed a space for all of them to come together as well. Although important, such a space has a lot of issues that we needed to tackle.
Building Thursday
Lounge: the digital watercooler
We wanted to create a communal place for our teams, before they spread out into smaller groups. Based on our user research, market analysis, and brainstorming ideas, we had 3 options:
Usercards presented a novel approach, replicating how we move around in real-life spaces while also proving to be fast and accessible enough in our early testing.
This concept went on to become Lounge.
Making of Lounge
Read my detailed essay on how we researched and developed Lounge
Lounge is an assembly space in Thursday. Think of it like, well, lounge in your office. It is where people gather, and do things together. Lounge is spatial, like a room. When you move your cursor, you move as well. creating a dynamic space where everyone's presence is felt.
Chat & React!
Audio isn’t the only way to say what you want, try Chat and Reactions next time.
Stage for facetime
Hop on stage for when you need to show those pearly whites!
Ice-breakers
Mini-activities you can play with your whole team together. Right inside lounge!
YouTube videos
Watch and enjoy any YouTube video together with your team.
Lounge was designed for larger groups, with multiple ways of interacting: Stage, a place for people who want to show their faces; Chat, which is ephemeral like real life; Reactions, when emojis capture your feelings better than words; Icebreakers, YouTube, and much more.
Mixers: Breakout activities that are fun, engaging and inclusive
For our breakout activities, we wanted them to have one goal above all else: maximize conversations!
Based on our brainstorm ideas we came up with concepts for mixer activities
We launched with only 3 of these and went on to add more for a total of 9 mixers:
Mixers are activities in Thursday. In mixers, you breakout into smaller groups to enhance participation and engage in a diverse set of activities. From fun games to meaningful conversations, competitive rounds to team-building sessions.
Mixers were designed to be of varied group sizes, with new groups formed each time to truly mix your team and boost engagement. Every mixer was thoughtfully designed with its own concept, goals, nuances, and interaction design, but we ended up with common principles for designing mixers. Read more in depth here:
Designing mixers to maximise conversations
Glimpse of 'Conversations', a set of 3 mixers in Thursday
Dashboard: Making the lives of organizers easier
Thursday was designed so that you can start easily with one click or customize it endlessly to suit your team's needs. To reduce any friction, we even allowed hosts to start without signing up. Hosts could schedule socials to their calendars, have new activities scheduled automatically using templates, and share them with the whole team using our Slack bot, reliving their best memories.
Scheduling a social, made simple with templates.
Thursday Slackbot sends social summaries
Scheduling a social, made simple with templates.
With these three elements: Lounge for meeting in larger groups, Mixers for engaging in varied activities with their coworkers, and a Dashboard where hosts could customize and schedule socials with host, we made it easier for everyone to focus on what matters—engaging with their teammates.
Results
A quick look inside Thursday
Thursday was a massive success on our goal to help remote teams build strong culture, made evident with our results below:
teams using thursday
socials hosted
KPIs
Recognition
mixer
4.8 overall
socials
Ratings
and more importantly by all the love Thursday received for its design:
Learnings
•
How important research is, and how even more important it is to synthesize it into a product.
•
Your first version is full of holes. The massive improvements an iterative process can make are unreal.
•
The importance of having an amazing team alongside you to push not just the product but also yourself to you best potential.
