Integrate Play: Building Company Culture Through the Power of Play.
This project had a lot of leeway in terms of design and decision- making. I was essentially creating on a blank page. Prior to jumping on the task of creating a responsive website for Integrate Play Solutions (IPS), it was necessary to understand the services they provide. IPS facilitates “serious play” within the workplace to help strengthen company culture, encourage team building, and
manage conflict resolution. The client came in and introduced serious play to me within a group of other participants. For one hour, we engaged in Lego team play which proved to be a useful team building exercise.
In this instance, Lego was used as a medium to express one self; the form that the Lego blocks took would be interpreted as a physical representation one’s current emotional state. Afterwards, time is allotted for every individual to speak their mind without any interruptions. By understanding the intent of the client’s services, I now had my own set of building blocks to construct her website with.
Many hours were first spent on domain research, discovering all sorts of companies around North America who are facilitating these types of play sessions. Few of these competitor websites stood out. Serious play is still quite a new term floating around in the workplace, but it does appear in more unique work spaces that value company culture. There were a few websites that portrayed exactly what serious play is and how it works. Lego Serious Play is one such example, started by Lego itself as a serious facilitation
tool for team building in adults and children. I was met with a lot of resistance from these companies when I requested interviews as they knew I was working for a competitor.
Alternatively, I opted to speak with Integrate Play Solution’s past clients. Fortunately, this turned out to be a great source for key insights. One insight that was brought to light was that IPS did not have a business model; her clients were all people whom she knew personally. This told me that I needed to design a website around an inbound marketing strategy to broaden IPS’ network outside of its current one. The website would be a success if it worked to bring in new clientele.
After speaking to several people about serious play and the facilitation of the sessions, I conducted a survey to gauge how users felt about website pop-ups. The client was very eager to have pop-ups on IPS’ website as a means to collect emails from potential clients. However, the pop-ups did not survey well and proved to be inefficient. To solve this, I instead created a call-to-
action section on almost every page, giving users the option of leaving their emails if they wanted to contact IPS or inquire further.
The planning stage initially involves creating an affinity diagram based on gathered qualitative data, followed by the making of a user persona. This affinity diagram was done in a quick five- minute sprint, observing all qualitative data on a wall and pinpointing any overlaps and similarities to establish a persona profile. The resulting persona was a team leader at a local tech company who wants to create a better company culture for her
workplace. Subsequently, a storyboard is built along with a must-have feature list and a site map/user flow chart.
The design studio portion of the project ran sprints of paper prototypes to figure out the best art direction. Testing early and often paid off as I was satisfied with an early art direction choice. Through several rounds of iterations over the course of a few weeks, wire framing was designed with digital marketing in mind. The goal was to bring in as much inbound marketing strategy as possible into this website. Below (bottom left), you can see a picture of the final high-fidelity call-to-action field, which will help
IPS acquire more clientele.
The first screens from the paper prototype home page and contact page are pictured here. These two pages experienced the most iterations over time. Adjacent are the mid-fidelity versions of the same screens. Eventually, both the message box and optional phone number box was removed.
Finally it was time to approach the hi-fidelity screens. A ten-second gut test was performed with the client which gave me some direction: the page needed to be colour heavy, without primary colours. This was the resulting style tile:
As you can see, the colours highly resemble Lego blocks. Rounded edges were employed to give the website a fun and comforting mood, but still remaining serious with the off-colour primary hues. Seen below is another hi-fidelity screen of the IPS’ new main home
page. It is colorful and playful, but also has an air of
professionalism. The bubbles at the bottom are hover-over buttons that provide brief descriptions of the pages they lead to. One last interactive touch was added; any time the user’s mouse touches a bubble,
that bubble will jiggle, creating a neat surprise.
There were many iterations of the logo design process because the client was picky and attached to her previous logo. Many different shapes, sizes, and colours were proposed before I ended up with one the client was happy with. The final logo was designed to represent the change one feels before and after serious play facilitation. It is meant to show that anyone can reach the finish
line of their self-chosen path.
In Conclusion
It was a lot of fun learning about serious play and increasing the potential to promote healthy work culture. I think this type of facilitation can be quite engaging and useful for any user in their work environment. From where this website started, it is an achievement to see it now in its organized and responsive form and I am proud to have been part of IPS’ business growth.
