Thursday
Reimagining a new paradigm for remote teams to socialize, connect, and build a strong culture—beyond video calls.
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.
Goals
Helping Remote Teams Build Strong Culture
1
Conduct discovery research to understand why remote socializing feels broken.
2
Translate research insights into a clear product opportunity and design direction.
3
Create an experience that transforms how remote teams socialize.
Research
What's 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
Top Three Insights
•
Most teams relied on Zoom or Google Meet to socialize. Using tools not built for socializing led to unsatisfactory results.
•
Inorganic events with rigid interfaces, such as those in an online video conferencing tool, are not effective at facilitating social interaction.
•
It is hard for organizers (HR, founders, managers) to manage hosting social events along with their core responsibilities.
Employees, Organisers and Management
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.
Process
Rethinking Remote Socials
With all the user research and meta-analysis, we started thinking of ideas for our product.
Brainstorming ideas
With these ideas, we prototyped extensively. From Figma prototypes to wizard-of-Oz-esque trials of our concepts, where we emulated our idea using existing products, we iterated our way to build Thursday, launching our beta in under three months and continuously improving it thereafter.
Building in Public
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/linkedin post could join our very first social and give us feedback on the very early product iteration.
Solution
Building Thursday, a place for remote teams to build strong culture
We identified two major themes: socializing is more effective in small groups (similar to real life), so we wanted to break large groups into smaller, more engaged ones. However, separating groups without allowing them to meet together did not align well with how teams typically interact, they needed a communal space for all of them to come together as well.
Real-life socializing
Online socializing
Creating a Digital Lounge
We wanted to find a balance between the rigidity of Zoom that makes it ineffective for social events and the complexity of tools like Gather Town that make it cumbersome.
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Zoom
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Gather Town
Spatial
Simple
Speed
Thursday
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 evolved into Lounge.
harshit ☕
Usercard
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.
Lounge in Thursday
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.
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.
Designing Mixer activities to maximise conversations
Lounge breaks out into smaller groups that we call mixers, with one goal: to maximize conversations!
Different Group Size
From one-on-ones to a dozen people at once.
New People Everytime
Rotating participants ensures fresh conversations.
Dynamic & Fun
Varied activities from collaborative to competitive.
Mixers are breakout activities in Thursday and each Mixer is distinct in its size and dynamic. From fun games to meaningful conversations, competitive rounds to team-building sessions.
Normal would you rather
Would you rather In Thursday
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:
Various Mixers in Thursday
The interactions were designed to make you feel as if you are not interacting with a screen. For example: instead of pressing a button to select an option in "Would You Rather", you actually move your video card to that side, similar to how you would if you were playing this game in real-life in a room.
Making the lives of organizers easier with Dashboard
Thursday was designed so that you can start easily with one click or customize it endlessly to suit your team's needs. 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
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, we made it easier for everyone to focus on what matters—engaging with their teammates.
A quick peek inside Thursday
Result
Winning Product of the Year Award
Thursday was a massive success on our goal to help remote teams build strong culture, made evident with our results below:
In under two years, Thursday became the go-to platform for over 1,000 remote teams—hosting 10,000+ socials and earning Product Hunt's Product of the Year (Golden Kitty) award.
More importantly it was loved by all its users:
“ 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. ”
Sarah Park
Head of people, Geneva
