top of page

Facebook Workplace

What if Facebook Workplace deployed life-sized holograms of employees to other employees’ remote working locations through the Workplace platform?

Let's Explore!

What Workplace Does

Workplace brings your company together by providing a suite of features that integrate with your existing work tools, giving you and everyone in your business simple, familiar ways to share information with the right people at the right time. So you can keep everyone in touch and on track to achieve your goals.

Current Features

Basic Features

  • Groups

  • Live Video Broadcasting

  • News Feed

  • Knowledge Library

  • Integrations

  • Chat

  • Voice and video calls

  • Multi-company groups

  • Directory

  • Events

  • Notes

  • Follow

  • Org chart

Advanced Features

  • Insights

  • Campaigns

  • Front line

  • Safety check

  • Important posts

  • Surveys

  • Badges

  • Draft for

  • Contact support

Key Personas
User Personas.JPG
Who can use Workplace
Use Case Diagram.png
What are people saying?

The comments on Workplace have generally gotten better over time since its launch in 2016 and the screen captures (from Capterra) below reflect some user sentiments in 2019. Of course, eight months is a long time in the world of software development and some of these sentiments may have changed due to bug fixes, added features or plain familiarisation. However, some key themes that people consider a problem include folder creation, file management, security, over-familiarity and project / task management capabilities.

 

There were 923 reviews altogether on Capterra with an average rating of 4.3/5 so it's safe to infer that people are generally happy with Workplace. The opportunities for improvement as well as surpassing expectations are also quite glaring since Facebook has to deal with stiff competition from companies such as Cisco and Microsoft who have much more experience in the enterprise space.

"Facebook's big issue is that they have no enterprise presence outside of ad sales and marketing analytics," - Daniel Rasmus, founder and principal analyst at Serious Insights

feedback 4.JPG
feedback 3.JPG
Feedback 2.JPG
Feedback 1.JPG
Competitive Landscape

Top competitors include Microsoft Teams, Slack, Cisco Webex Teams, Salesforce Chatter and Jive. See below for competitor analysis.

Competitor.png

 

 

Microsoft will, perhaps, be Facebook's closest competition when it comes to deploying holograms since Microsoft has already demoed holograph experiences during last year's Microsoft Inspire conference. This is however not a feature of Microsoft Teams currently so Facebook could still be in the running for one of the first deployers of this feature on its collaboration platform.

​

As for document collaboration, Microsoft is not the only company in the game as Jive and Salesforce have also launched this feature and have also added version control to their offering. There's still plenty of time for Facebook to launch its own version of these features and I think this could further establish Facebook as a serious enterprise contender.

SWOT

So far, we have considered what Workplace users are saying and how Workplace measures up to some of its competitors and it would probably take a more comprehensive focus group to fully capture the feedback. This initial research will now be be distilled into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The opportunities will provide a snapshot of some quick wins that can be achieved by a new product manager joining the Workplace team whilst the strengths shows the existing assets from which some of these opportunities can be pursued.

 

The threats can also not be ignored as companies fear that data breaches could occur due to Facebook's history with data and Workplace must find a way to gain user trust in their ability and willingness in securing people's data.

SWOT.png

 

Now, let's explore the opportunities.

Why should people care about a new hologram feature?

Most people are aware of the benefits of working from home such as increased productivity and reduced costs for both employers and employees. In recent times, there has been a shift from this being a desirable trend to it being the only option to carry out our professional duties. With these advantages comes the isolation that result from seating at home all day. In addition to this, the increased adoption of lean and agile methodologies means that collaboration is much more important to ensure seamless workflows and task visibility.

​

Holograms would improve the quality of both professional and social collaborations at work. Stand-ups and design sprints could be held "face-to-face" whilst working remotely and you and your workmates could share some beer in the same room.

Example User Story
User Story.png

*WFH: Working From Home

Let's break this user story into functionalities

  • As an enterprise professional, I want to transport me and my teammates to my location for design sprint and stand-ups

  • As a  school head, I want to hold weekly assemblies with my students in our school hall

  • As a founder, I want to meet up with my clients to give a more realistic demo of our products

  • As a product manager I want my team and I to virtually share a board during design sprints

  • As a professional, I want to receive a request when people ask to be casted into my home

  • As a professional, I want to set time limits for my hologram meetings in order to ensure effective sprints

  • As a professional, I want to be able to delay my inbound Holocalls so I can get settled if I'm running late

UI and Wireframes
Wireframe.png
Prototyping

A life-sized hologram that is an exact replica of users need to be rendered live, along with their unique voices using Mixed Reality and Voice Recognition technologies. Home and office settings can also be reconstructed into a virtual space in order to recreate the feeling of working within a familiar environment.

 

To create a functioning prototype, Facebook can leverage its existing AR and VR assets such as Oculus and the Portal on Workplace. Luckily, a virtual collaborative workspace is already in the works by Facebook Research Labs and we had a glimpse of what's possible during the 2019 Oculus Connect 6 event. In the words of Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist, Facebook Reality Labs:

Facebook's acquisition of the neural monitoring start-up, Control Labs, is definitely as step in the right direction towards building more intuitive and natural interactions that uses humans' existing mental models within VR and AR.

What would success look like for the Hologram feature?

The goal here would be engagement and retention. It will be great to know the number of existing Workplace users that adopt this feature as well as which new users sign up to Workplace exclusively because of the Hologram feature. Here are a few metrics to consider for measuring the success of this feature:

KPIs and Metrics

  • DAU: Daily Active Users

  • MAU: Monthly Active Users

  • DRU: Daily Returning Users

  • WRU: Weekly Returning Users

  • MRU: Monthly Returning Users

  • ARPU: Average Revenue Per User

  • TTEV: Time to Enterprise Value

  • Churn (Customer and Revenue Churn)

  • LTV: Life Time Value

DAU and MAU are popular metrics that are tracked by most software applications. However, since Holograms require an appreciable change in mindset and human behaviour, it is imperative to understand how many users are returning this feature (DRU, WRU and MRU), thereby, adopting it as a way of life. This is even more important since work is a daily occurrence for most people and the sustainability of this feature is significantly dependent on getting people to adopt this as a daily, weekly or monthly part of their work routine.

​

TTEV will be an important part of the pricing strategy of this feature since its adoption curve could vary from a standard technology adoption lifecycle. Facebook could offer users the opportunity to experience this feature for free for up to 30 minutes daily and TTEV will be measured as how long it takes for the enterprise to sign up to a paid version of this feature with all its capabilities for at least three team members.

 

"For five years now, I've been wishing for a VR work space that I could configure any way I wanted with monitor quality virtual screens, holograms, whiteboards and wherever. Saving and switching between configurations with a click.

​

Throw in the ability to interact with my real surroundings, and use a keyboard mouse and that would be a great work environment.

​

Then if I could share virtual spaces with other people, it would become an amazing productive collaborative environment as well. And while I'm at it, it'd be great to have the ability to manipulate both real and virtual objects with my hands complete with haptic feedback.

​

I would use that in a heartbeat and I believe that it would spread like wildfire."

​

bottom of page