Building Real Connections in a Remote Workplace
Client
Thrillworks
Role
UX Designer
Researcher
Team
Ruixin Dai
Liz Li
Ruizhe Wang
Qi Wang
Yiding Li
Overview
PawPals is a gamified Microsoft Teams plugin designed to spark spontaneous, meaningful connections in remote workplaces.
Created in response to a challenge from Thrillworks, the project tackles the loneliness and social disconnect of remote work by giving employees shared digital pets to care for and interact with.
Built through collaborative research, testing, and prototyping, PawPals reimagines “water cooler chats” as playful, pressure-free interactions that help build trust and team culture — one virtual paw at a time.
Time Line
4-month sprint (Jan - April 2024)
"Peer relationship building: Foster social engagement and informal connections at work (i.e. water cooler chats), these are not performance based rather methods of building company culture while working remotely."
— A Design Chanllange from
Our Team
Discover
In remote work environments, informal workplace interactions play a crucial role in building company culture and fostering connections among employees. But not everyone can access them equally. Employees with social anxiety or lower confidence often miss out, leading to reduced connection, self-expression, and belonging. We aimed to design a more inclusive way to foster casual, meaningful interaction online.
Primary Research: Se-mi Structure Interviews
During the interviews, participants from various industries will provide feedback individually, allowing our team to gather both qualitative and quantitative insights to support our analysis.
Interview Insights
- Challenges
Remote workers often face passivity, unclear goals, siloed departments, fear of being judged, difficulty forming close friendships, unclear communication, and unequal chances to speak. - Opportunities
Participants hope for safe spaces that encourage vulnerability, authenticity, empathy, peer support, engaging and playful elements, safe self-expression, equal voice, minimal work disruptions, and small group bonding.
Secondary Research: Competitors
Spontaneously Used Methods
- Casual Non-Work Spaces
Slack enables "channels" for leisurely employee interaction areas like "pet sharing," and "travel." - Online/Offline Events
Companies host online events like movie nights and offline meetups to foster team building. - Face-to-Face Communication
Camera and microphone use in remote work enhances trust, focus, and immediate feedback.
Collaborative Games (Ice-breaker)
- Totem
- Second Life
- The Moth: A Game of Storytelling
- Table-top Role-Playing Games
Remote Collaborative Products
- Team Flow
Simple Slack-integrated virtual office, but limited customization and weak onboarding for new hires. - Sowork
Gamified and creative with customizable spaces, but may feel less professional and harder for non-gamers. - Gather
Easy-to-use gamified platform with social features, though over-reliant on plugins and less scalable. - Shapes XR
Immersive VR collaboration for design teams, but limited to XR use cases and lacks general office functions.
Market Opportunity
The demand for tools that strengthen remote team culture is rapidly growing:
- Remote Working Tools/Software: Valued at $30.5 billion in 2024, projected to grow at a 21.8% CAGR through 2034.
- Team Collaboration Software: Estimated at $36.1 billion in 2024, expected to reach $57.4 billion by 2030 with a 7.4% CAGR.
- Team Building Services: Valued at $3.2 billion in 2025, projected to hit $9.9 billion by 2033, growing at a 20.16% CAGR.
Define
Entry Point: What makes people feel genuinely connected in remote spaces?
We identified 4 key factors for building online relationships:
There’s a similar scenario that answers this question: multiplayer online games. In games, people work together toward common goals, meet compatible teammates, freely show their self-expression, and build trust by being their authentic self — all while having fun.
We wanted to bring this same feeling into remote work. Thus we take gamification as our mean metodology.
Solution
Our product promotes to Embrace Flow and Good Hard Work to provide an effective safe space for self-expression in order to promote health personal connections and well-being.
Since many companies already use Microsoft Teams for daily work, we chose to build our service as a Teams plugin to fit naturally into employees’ existing workflow.
- No extra apps to install — easier adoption.
- Keeps social interaction close to where work happens, without disrupting productivity.
- Familiar interface reduces learning curve for users.
During ideation, we mapped each idea based on impact (How well does it solve user pain points) and effort (How complex is it to build, integrate, and adopt in real workplaces).
After discussion, we finally decided to expand the possibilities of virtual pet space.
Personas
Develop
Key Features
🐱 Pet Module
- Create & customize personal pets
- Interact with pets through feeding, playing, and mini-games
- Pets grow, level up, and earn achievements
- Health, mood, and behavior monitoring
- Virtual goods store for pet accessories and dress-up
💬 Social & Communication Module
- Cross-department social events & challenges
- Real-time chat and buddy system for networking
- Community forums, sticky notes, and asynchronous communication
- Event notifications and interaction history tracking
🏠 Scene Module
- Personal and public space customization
- Purchase and arrange furniture, decorations, and layouts
- Set access rights for private or shared spaces
- Host interactive events like pet parties and space competitions
🏆 Points & Rewards System
- Earn points through daily activities and challenges
- Redeem rewards and special items
- Progress tracking with achievement badges
- Random event mechanics for surprise bonuses
User Flow
Testing and Feedback
How It Works:
- Setup: Establish common understanding by sharing project background information.
- Share: Introduce paper prototype to engage and prompt reflection on project concepts.
- Clarify: Pose 3 targeted questions post-test to gather specific insights and reflections.
- Critique: Collect detailed feedback from user groups on prototype reactions and presented ideas.
- Follow-Ups: Conclude with a Q&A for additional discussion and clarification on feedback.
Key Insights
- Conversation Guidance: Users need help starting conversations, especially with new people.
- Inclusivity: Design should ensure everyone feels involved and prevent isolation.
- Customization: Users want rich, flexible pet personalization and the ability to update pets later.
- Social Buffer: Pets help ease interaction, but communication flow should shift toward person-to-person connections.
- Real-Life Integration: Users are open to pets providing helpful daily reminders (e.g. breaks, water).
- Motivation: Clear rewards and real-life benefits increase long-term engagement.
Deliver
Final Prototype
We chose Teams as the application platform for building the Pawpals plugin prototype, as it is one of the most commonly used remote work platforms, offers a rich library of plugins, and allows plugins to be built on the web within the platform.
After entering the plugin, users need to select their department or team to enter the pet activity room they belong to.
We hope to make it easier for users to express themselves within the work community. We offer a variety of choices for the body, ears, tail, and eyes. Users can try various bizarre combinations when creating pets, which could be very unique even like a puppy with a fish tail.
Before creating a pet, users can preview the pets currently owned by the team to understand how their team members express themselves.
All interactions between users and pets will appear in the chat box. Communication between users will become more gentle through the mediation of pets.
The pet activity room is the main area of activity for users. Not only can users interact with any pet, but they can also communicate and chat with team members.
It's another form of "water cooler" space, but through pet interactions, people have a common goal to engage with.
The chat box will include all the features it should have, such as sending emojis, voice or video calls, background music playback, and so on.
Pets can have a wide variety of interactions. Users can train their own pets, or help take care of someone else's pet. Selecting a pet will bring up a status panel, where users can see basic information and the status of the pet, as well as the avatar of the user who has currently selected that pet.
Users can make changes to their pets on the pet profile page. This section will also display the achievement trophies completed by the pet.
Users can earn token points by completing tasks or achieving milestones during interactions with pets. In the points redeem store, these points can be exchanged for a variety of items, including furniture and space decorations.
Asynchronous communication distinguishes internet interactions from face-to-face conversations. This can be leveraged in informal remote work communications.
The pet events section will record events that happen in the pet room. This could be interactions others have made with the user's own pets or random public events.
Daily tasks keep the experience fresh for users, encouraging them to participate in pet interactions, interact with other people's pets, and earn exchangeable tokens in the process.
Each pet activity room comes with a note board where anyone can leave sticky notes. Users can ask other team members to take care of their pets, record events with pets, and interact with visitors from other departments. (If users visit another department's pet room, they can also leave messages on their note board.)
Pawpals can facilitate cross-departmental communication. Users can browse and select from a building floor plan, taking their pets to visit other departments' pet rooms, allowing for interesting interactions between pets (and peers).
Cross-department communication can also be unintentional and casual. All pets have the need to go outside. Just like walking a dog, you need to take your pet out for walks from time to time, chatting with peers who happen to be walking their pets in outdoor scenes.
Users can also walk their colleagues' pets for them. In this scenario, users can select all the pets they want to take out.
Accessibility Goals
- Support for Social Anxiety: Create a safe, low-pressure space for users who feel anxious or awkward initiating conversations, including new hires and cross-department teams.
- Global & Inclusive Expression: Offer diverse pet customization options to allow users from different cultural backgrounds to express themselves freely.
- Indirect Interaction: Use pets as social buffers to lower the barrier for casual interaction, making conversations feel natural and less intimidating.
- Shared Goals & Community Building: Foster common, non-work-related goals to help users build connections and a sense of belonging beyond work tasks.
Next Step...
- Add trophy, points, and reward systems to boost engagement.
- Connect pets more to work life with fun, customizable content.
- Create richer, dynamic pet interactions to spark conversations.
- Introduce light, non-intrusive reminders through chat.
- Design simple onboarding for new users.
- Encourage team events like pet parties and competitions.
- Improve accessibility for diverse users and work styles.
- Explore VR integration for future immersive experiences.
Reflection
PawPals was more than just a playful concept — it was a meaningful exploration into how design can make remote work feel more human. Through research, collaboration, and continuous iteration, we discovered that small, gentle interactions can help people feel seen, connected, and included — even when separated by screens.
By combining gamification, indirect interaction, and personalization, we created a solution that lowers social anxiety, encourages authentic connection, and builds team culture in a way that feels natural, not forced. This project also challenged us to balance creativity and practicality, constantly grounding our ideas in real user needs and business feasibility.
This project reminded me that strong collaboration is just as critical as strong ideas. Throughout the process, our team navigated different perspectives and shifting scopes, but by actively listening, staying flexible, and continually aligning around user needs, we were able to transform challenges into clear, focused decisions. The experience strengthened my ability to work through ambiguity, balance diverse input, and contribute to a solution we were all proud to deliver.
For me personally, PawPals strengthened my skills in research-driven design, accessibility thinking, and cross-functional collaboration — all while reminding me that even serious problems can be solved with a little playfulness.