Empowering Knowledge Workers: Overcoming Stuckness

Knowledge workers often face cognitive demands in their work, and being "stuck" on a task can lead to stress and dissatisfaction. To design effective interventions, we first needed to understand the strategies that workers use to overcome obstacles. The aim of this project was to design interventions to help knowledge workers overcome obstacles and get "unstuck" in their work.

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Approach

We used a human-centered approach and qualitative and quantitative approaches in gathering data.

We collected data through:

• conducting informal interviews

• conducting a survey with 54

• analyzing existing tools in the market that support "unstuck"

Based on the findings, we designed and evaluated two low-fidelity prototypes:

• the Coach

• the Pill

They differed in the level of choice presented to users when suggesting strategies to get "unstuck".

 

We conducted a usability study with nine participants to evaluate the prototypes.

 

Outcome

Our survey findings showed that being "stuck" was most often characterized as "not being able to continue to make progress on a task". We designed two prototypes. In the prototype evaluation, participants appreciated the specific, personalized strategies presented by the Pill design but valued having more agency and choice in the Coach design.

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Impact

The findings and design recommendations for future interventions were handed over to the client and presented at the DFP showcase.

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