1. Working from home is the new normal, and it’s here to stay. In an international survey of 2285 remote workers, 71% of managers and employees desire work-from-home options even after the pandemic is over.
2. However, working from home can blur the boundaries between home and work, intrude both physically and psychologically on family time, and can encourage overwork and work preoccupation.
3. The lack of dedicated workspaces, competing priorities at home, and increase in distractions, can lead to more mental fatigue and poor mental well-being.

To further our understanding of professionals working from home, we conducted virtual contextual inquiries. Participants invited us into their homes to give us a virtual tour of their workspace and home environment and speak about how it affects their mental well-being.

1. Professionals feel mentally healthy when they can do their best at work and take care of themselves.
• Mentally healthy means that you are in a good mindset to do whatever you need to do, to accomplish whatever tasks you have in a way that you don’t feel overwhelmed. -P1
2. Working from home increases mental fatigue by making it difficult for professionals to separate their different life roles and responsibilities.
• When you are working from home, it all bleeds into each other. So it’s hard to separate that mentally. -P4
3. Professionals who have to share their workspace with other people experience more mental fatigue when they have to adapt to find privacy and avoid distractions.
• When people come down the stairs, I'm hyper conscious of that... it's ever present in my mind. - P1

From these insights we created 3 desired outcomes, to serve as a reminder throughout the design process that we’re working towards a design response that is based on the needs of professionals working from home.

1. Reduce mental fatigue to save energy for work and personal activities.
2. Improve the mental well-being of professionals working from home.
3. Easy integration into any home.

With these insights and desired outcomes in mind, we crafted the following how might we statement to guide us in ideation:

How might we help professionals working from home improve their mental well-being by creating personalized ways to manage mental fatigue given the limits of their home?

In response to the design challenge, each of us sketched 30 ideas. We then plotted our 90 ideas on a 2x2 matrix and affinitized.

We then used a dot voting method to narrow down our 90 ideas. Each of us voted for 5 ideas that either stood out or sparked interest. 10 ideas remained.

Leveraging our desired outcomes and insights, we crafted 4 design principles to help us further down select. Design principles are important in creating a shared evaluation language and helped my team and I align on our product values.

After discussing each idea, we narrowed down to our top 3 ideas.

We refined and made a storyboard for each idea to illustrate the high-level experience. Then presented each concept to our peers and instructors. The critique session focused on two main things: which product addresses mental well-being the most and which product is the most exciting/ interesting.

Based on the feedback, FlexiScreen evoked the most excitement and people felt that it addressed mental well-being the most.

As we continued to refine our concept, it’s important to establish a design direction so that we're aligned on both the visual and emotional aspect of our product. I led my team through this process by first identifying our brand values. Through a brainstorming session, we generated words that represent our design principles. I then synthesized them into 4 brand values/ attributes: soothing, harmonious, personal, and approachable. We then dived into creating moodboards that represent those values.

A modern look with soft and warm colors. We want to create a personal and soothing experience, with a clean and welcoming feel. Also, we decided to change the name of FlexiScreen to Lumina because Lumina felt more soothing and welcoming.

Lumina is a flexible digital space divider that creates a personal work environment that promotes mental well-being. By establishing both physical and mental separation in your workspace, Lumina gives you more privacy, less distractions, and better boundaries between your work and home.

I created the mobile app information architecture to illustrate key interaction points which allowed us to get feedback and iterate before investing time into prototyping.

With the first iteration of our core concept and information architecture set, we begin prototype planning. We defined 3 key paths accompanied by a set of research questions to test with our low-fidelity prototypes. Prototype planning helped with establishing an aligned agenda on what questions we want to answer and helped ensure we’re using our time wisely when creating low-fidelity prototypes. Here are our key paths:

1. Adjust how we present Lumina. We want to emphasize that Lumina is not a “screen” similar to a TV or monitor due to concerns about screen fatigue.
2. Add a save custom settings feature. A save custom settings feature will help create a more personalized experience and streamline the process for finding the ideal settings.
3. Keep the exterior simple. We want to ensure that Lumina is non-intrusive within the household. So keeping the exterior simple meant that the status message would be more subtle.
4. Implement customizable texts. Instead of being limited to 3 statuses (do not disturb, working, and available) we learned that it would be better that professionals could create their own personal message on the exterior to help communicate various situations.

I created the Lumina mobile app design system within Figma. This helped ensure we have a cohesive visual design throughout the interface. The visual decisions were guided by our established design direction. We went with a light lavender purple as our primary color to create a soothing feel. We used Proxima Nova as our primary typeface because of its clean, modern, and friendly look.