Thinking About User Experience (UX) When It Comes To Kent and London Office Design

You may be asking yourself what UX (short for User Experience) has got to do with office design?

The term UX may be known to you if you move in design circles. UX is a process which tries to improve the user experience, and to meet their needs, when it comes to using products, technology and services with the aim of increasing user satisfaction and encouraging continued user engagement. We’ve all experienced bad products and services and know that a poor user experience can lead to frustration and unhappy users who are unlikely to be motivated or productive.

Although, UX is normally used to create user interfaces it can also be used to create an office design that provides employees with an environment which enables them to work efficiently and effectively while providing them with a workplace they can look forward to coming to and a user experience that they find enjoyable.

Why User-Centric Office Design Matters

Based on articles, papers, research and surveys of employees, there are a number of key UX factors that can impact workers productivity and job satisfaction.

According to Siemens white paper “The future office: Putting people at the core” “Office workers across all generations want more collaborative, user-centric work spaces to unleash their full potential. User-centric offices help increase employee productivity because employees are healthier, collaborate more easily, spend their office time effectively on value-add tasks, and feel more accomplished. Apart from productivity increases, user-centric offices can help secure future talent for companies, while non-movers risk losing in the war for talent.” 

Emerald Insight’s paper on “User-focused office renovation: a review into user satisfaction and the potential for improvement” looked at “user-focussed“ design and refurbishment of offices spaces. The paper investigated “users’ needs and the physical and psychological factors affecting user satisfaction, as input to office renovation projects.” They found a number of factors increased user satisfaction. These factors were associated with “physical and psychological satisfaction and comfort” and included thermal comfort, air quality, noise, light, user control, privacy, spatial comfort, concentration, communication/collaboration and social contact.

ResearchGate’s conference paper “Design for UX in Flexible Offices – Bringing Research and Practice Together” suggests that there is a gap in the design research and practice that stifles improvements and idea generation when it comes to flexible office environments that needs to be addressed in order to improve the user experience at work.

A Forbes article “Office Design Matters More Than Ever—Using UX Principles Can Help” says that successful UX is dependent on understanding your customer. It’s important to understand what your staff needs, by listening to their feedback. Making your staff’s life’s easier by “solving the issues that impacted employee efficiency, creating a new environment that truly makes them want to step through our front doors” can lead to a successful UX office design.

Arch Daily looked at “The Employee Experience: Designing Workplaces from User Research” and suggests that office designers can draw inspiration from user experience and research to design office spaces that not only meet quantitative metrics like seat ratio, cost per square foot and occupancy rates but qualitative metrics such as job satisfaction and addressing pain points experienced when using a workspace to help design the ideal workspace.

The University of New South Wales found that “Prioritising user experience, fine-tuning work spaces to support user needs and designing for health and wellbeing will deliver higher levels of satisfaction, perceived productivity and creativity” in the workplace. They state that the key to the office of the future isn’t just about flexibility but how office space addresses the challenges faced by staff, “taking into account physical workspace, the diversity of people’s needs and the power of technology.”

Business and Industry suggests the office needs a UX strategy and that office spaces need to learn from industries like tech, retail and hospitality which understand and have mastered the art of customer service. This is backed up by the British Council for Offices which tells employers and office designers to “treat office workers like customers that need to be acquired and retained, and to find out what they want by means including experimentation and analysing metrics” in an effort to make the office a place that gives staff the experiences they want.

The Factors That Influence UX (Products, Services and Office Design)

There are a number of key factors that shape a user’s experience when using a product or service, which can also be applied to office design, and it’s these factors that determine whether the user has a positive outcome. They are:

Needs To Be Useful and Fulfil A Purpose

Any product or service needs to be useful and fulfil a purpose. Without this its inherently useless. It maybe that the usefulness of the product is in the way that it solves an issue or makes it easier to carry out a task or piece of work. It may also be specifically tailored to meet a user’s needs which allows them to more easily carry out a project or task.

Needs To Be Practical and Usable

Usability is the foundation of user experience and allows a user to effectively and efficiently achieve their end objective. Something can look good at first glance but ultimately prove to be unusable or difficult to use. Aesthetics are great but if a product is impractical, complicated or difficult to use it is likely to have a detrimental effect on the user experience.

Needs to Be Findable

Ideally you want your users to be able to use a product with the minimal number of steps. They need to be able to “find” what they are looking for without having to search or guess where to go.

Needs To Engender Trust

Credibility is about trust. It requires the user to trust in the product and know that when they use it, it won’t just do the job, but it will be reliable, last for significant amount of time and work for them in a way that makes for an enjoyable, or at least, efficient user experience

Needs To Be Desirable

Desirability is a complex factor. How desirable a product is, comes down to marketing, design, brand, aesthetics and identity. The value of the product will also play a part. What is desirable to one person may not be desirable to another if it doesn’t fulfil a purpose for them.

Needs To Be Accessible

Accessibility is an important but often overlooked factor when it comes to user experience. Accessibility is about ensuring that a product can be used by everyone. Including users with disabilities isn’t just a legal obligation it also opens up your business to many more users.

Needs To Add Value

A product must deliver value (ROI) to a business and to the user who is using it by making the user experience easier, more effective and efficient or by simply making the experience pleasant. If it’s not valued, it’s unlikely to be successful. It’s therefore important that the right product is designed and delivered, backed up by the right research, feedback and planning to ensure it meets a businesses and user’s needs.

How Can UX Be Applied To Office Design?

Given the factors that influence UX outlined above how can they be applied to office design?

In general office design is mainly driven by the business looking to have their office space redesigned or refurbished and it’s clearly very important that business requirements are identified and defined however a UX approach looks to involve users in the office design process.

In simple terms UX design takes a people-first approach to the design of a product, in this case the design of an office space. It focusses on the user experience from start to finish and looks to solve issues or problems that the user encounters in their day-to-day work resulting in a workplace that provides the facilities and environment that lets staff do their jobs more effectively and efficiently by removing any obstacles or hurdles and streamlining work processes and tasks within an enjoyable working environment.

To do this it’s important to determine early on in the office design phase what the user requirements and wants are. This should be done side by side with the business goals and requirements in order to be able to bring together an “ideal office design” which meets both the businesses and users’ needs.

UX Factors To Consider In Office Design

In order to design an “user-experience-centric” workspace the factors above need to be taken into account in the office design. By considering these factors and implementing an office design that takes into consideration users’ expectations and needs and addresses them you can help to establish the best UX fit and design for an office space that will more than meet your employee needs and wants and will provide them with an “ideal” working environment.

Below we outline a number of the key UX design factors that should be considered in the design your UX-centric office:

Designing For Flow and Navigation

In the digital world UX design looks to help users navigate and find what they are looking for within the software platform. You want to make it as easy as possible for users to find the information they want quickly and easily. In the case of a physical office space, especially in larger companies where they may take up many floors and occupy a great deal of floor space, its vital to give the user signposts and navigation that feel natural and part of the office so that they can find the right office space, meeting room and breakout area without causing delays which can lead to loss of time and unwanted frustration.

You can make navigation easier through the use use of different flooring types or colours that can be used to create zones or identify departments or groups. Arrow shapes embedded into floor tiles can be used to provide simple direction to new starters, clients or guests to direct them to specific areas within a building.

Its also important to consider how the physical design can make it easier for users to move through their day by looking at designing a dynamic and flexible office space that encourages movement, wellbeing, collaboration and socialisation. By going beyond simply providing functional workstations, an office space can provide an environment that allows staff to seamlessly transition from task to task and between work and breaks.

Designing For Privacy

From a user experience perspective we know that privacy is important in the office setting. A Steelcase study of the workplace carried out by IPSOS of over 10,500 workers across Europe, North America and Asia confirm that “insufficient privacy in the workplace is an issue throughout the world.” The survey shows that “being able to concentrate, work in teams without being interrupted or choose where to work based on the task are frequently unmet needs.” Steelcase estimates the cost of “disengagement” as a result of unmet needs within the work environment is costing the UK between £52 billion and £70 billion.

In most businesses there is a need for both collaboration and privacy and its finding the right balance which allows office users to work efficiently and effectively. This is borne out by a survey by Gensler “What we’ve learned about focus in the workplace”. The survey found that of the 90,000 people from 155 companies across 10 industries surveyed focus work was what was most critical to their job. Gensler goes onto say that “[these findings] indicate that the criticality and time spent on focus have increased. These increases seem surprising given the emphasis on collaboration by many businesses, but when you look at work factors that have changed since 2007, less space, less privacy, more time at work and more distractions are making focus work more important and time-consuming.”

Privacy features can be easily incorporated into an office design. The use of acoustic booths or pods can provide a great privacy option. Modular furniture, moveable partitions, screens, storage walls and planting in cabinets, containers and racks can also provide some degree of privacy. Modular and moveable options can provide flexibility allowing work areas to be adapted for privacy as and when required.

Designing For Health and Wellbeing

An increasing awareness of the need for good mental and physical health and wellbeing in the office has helped to drive changes in office design trends that address user experience in terms of health and happiness. Research has shown that businesses that invest in office design which provides staff with a healthy work environment see a number of benefits including improved employee health, increased productivity, lower employee stress and reduced absenteeism.

According to Deloitte’s fourth report on mental health and the workplace 63% of those who responded said they were experiencing burnout ranging from feeling exhausted, distant from their job, or showing a decline in their workplace performance. Deloitte say that “for every £1 spent on mental health and wellbeing of their workforce, employers get (on average) about £4.70 back in increased productivity.” The cost of poor mental health could be as much as £51bn per year to UK employers.

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) say 25% of workers in the UK feel unable to cope with workplace stress and 79% report moderate-to-high stress levels.

Occupational Health and Wellbeing report that a poll of 2,149 adults, by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych), Society of Occupational Medicine (SOM) and Faculty of Occupational Medicine, found that 9% of adults in the UK had to take time off work for mental ill health last year. 45% of those had not returned to work for a month or more.

A positive user experience comes from providing the facilities that positively impact health and wellbeing as well as providing office users with an office space that delivers the appropriate spaces for taking breaks, encourages movement and physical activity and provides opportunities for socialisation. It also stems from having a comfortable and ergonomically designed workspace and furniture alongside good lighting and ventilation, thermal comfort and acoustics which works to reduce office noise pollution.

Designing For Flexibility

Harvard Business Review’s “Employees Perform Better When They Can Control Their Space” found that there was “an emerging suite of literature and research—including the 2013 Gensler Workplace Survey [which] clearly points to the power of choice and autonomy to drive not only employee happiness, but also motivation and performance… knowledge workers whose companies allow them to help decide when, where, and how they work were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, performed better, and viewed their company as more innovative than competitors that didn’t offer such choices.”

Savills 2019 research articles “What Workers Want: Europe 2019”, “What Workers Want: Productivity and flexible working” and “Health and happiness in the office” say that “63% of workers feel that if the current layout/design of their office matched their ideal workplace, this would have a positive impact of their productivity. Workers need a choice of workspace in order to allow them to realise their full potential.” 21% of staff want to change the internal design or fit-out of their workplace, compared to 3% that would like to change the external design and 15% that want to change their personal workspace however only 34% of staff had been asked for their opinion on their workplace by their employer.

Offices which are designed for flexibility can be easily adapted to user’s needs and their style of working, in a way that means layouts and workstations can be simply and efficiently changed. A flexible layout can provide different layouts tailored to the task in hand including private, focussed individual work or collaborative team or creative work, getting together with a group of colleagues for a meeting or taking a break. By having this flexibility office users can choose where, when and how they work depending on their working style and the type of work or task they are carrying out. By allowing users to easily transition to different types of working spaces user experience is improved as staff can take personal control over their working environment, empowering them to move to different setups which will enhance their workplace performance, efficiency and enjoyment or simply when they feel it is required.

A flexible office design can be achieved through the use of modular and adaptable furniture, moveable technology such as digital screens, reliable Wi-Fi that can be accessed via multiple points throughout the office and partitioning solutions which can be moved to wherever they are required.

These are just a few of the many office design factors that can influence and impact staff user experience and which should be considered when planning your next office refurbishment. It’s clear that it’s important  to involve staff at all stages of a new office design to understand user needs and to gather ideas and feedback as the design process progresses.

JBH Refurbishments, Experts In Office Design and Refurbishment

JBH Refurbishments are a cat a and cat b fit out contractor and have over 30+ years experience in Kent and London office design, office refurbishments and fit outs. We can provide the right expertise for your Kent or London office refurbishment. We understand what’s required to carry out an office refurbishment which takes into account user experience design requirements. From your brief, to putting together a project plan, to developing your office design and layout to delivering your office fit out JBH Refurbishments will provide the right expertise for your project providing peace of mind. You can contact us on 0333 207 0339 or via our contact page or by calling us on 0333 207 0339 today for a free on-site consultation.


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Thinking About User Experience (UX) When It Comes To Kent and London Office Design

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