Guide to running experiments in a low occupancy world

To start your process you’ll want to get a good idea of who your designing this experiment / solution for. If you’re an established workplace team, you may have a lot of information and data about the teams you serve already. That’s great. You should match this data with observation of how people use your spaces and also surveys as well. The more information you have the better your process will go.

Once you have all the information gathered and understand the needs of the group you’re creating s solution for, you can start to define what problem you’re solving. In the define stage you will work to connect dots and draw out key insights from the empathize stage. You’ll then craft a problem statement that gets to the heart of the challenge you’re trying to meet.

With your problem statement in hand, you can now begin brainstorming for potential solutions. You will want to create as many potential solution ideas as possible so that you can whittle them down to a smaller number later. You can do this via voting, or having your actual end users be involved in the process and have them help select the solutions to prototype and test.

In this stage you’ll begin to design and build your solution(s). Prototyping is best when it’s done with low fidelity / low cost methods. The more prototypes you can create and test the better. So instead of creating one 10,000 sq ft test space, you might make two 5,000 sq ft test spaces with different designs.  

While designing your experiment you’ll want to decide how you are going to measure success. There are many ways to measure success of a built environment; utilization, surveys, observing use, or feedback from sessions with users. No matter how you decide to measure, it’s important to keep in mind that without measuring, it will be impossible to improve in the next phase of experimentation when you return to the beginning of this process.