Smart Desk UI

This innovative project involved designing and developing a user interface for a cutting-edge smart desk, redefining the way people experience their workspace. The smart desk offers a host of features, each aimed at enhancing productivity, comfort, and personalization. This project seamlessly integrates technology into the traditional workspace, ensuring a harmonious blend of efficiency and user comfort.

Key Features:

1. Notes and To-Do Lists:

• The smart desk's interface provides a digital notepad for users to jot down quick notes, ideas, or tasks.

• It also features a dynamic to-do list manager, enabling users to organize their daily tasks and goals.

2. Height Adjustments:

• The desk is equipped with a height-adjustable mechanism, allowing users to easily transition between sitting and standing positions.

• It promotes better ergonomics, comfort, and health by reducing the strain on the body during long work hours.

3. Notion Integration:

• The smart desk seamlessly integrates with popular productivity software, such as Notion. Users can access their Notion workspace directly from the desk's interface.

• This integration allows for easy access to project management tools, collaborative workspaces, and notes, all within arm's reach.

4. Reminders:

• Users can set reminders for important tasks, meetings, or breaks directly from the desk's interface.

• The system sends notifications, helping users stay organized and on top of their schedules.

5. Personalization:

• The smart desk personalizes the user experience by remembering user preferences, such as preferred desk height and frequently used notes.

• It also offers customizable themes, allowing users to tailor the visual aesthetics of their workspace.

This project redefines the conventional desk space by incorporating technology to enhance user productivity and well-being. By introducing features like notes, to-do lists, height adjustments, Notion integration, and reminders, the smart desk streamlines the workflow, reduces clutter, and improves work-life balance.

This smart desk offers a glimpse into the future of workspaces, where technology plays a pivotal role in creating more efficient, organized, and user-centric work environments. It's a testament to the possibilities of combining traditional furniture with cutting-edge technology to improve our daily lives.

Interview Findings

Interview Questions:

1.     What do you use a desk for?

2.     How long are you typically at your desk?

3.     What is the ideal size/shape would you want for your desk?

4.     What do you like or dislike about your desk?

5.     What kind of productivity applications do you find yourself using daily?

6.     Do you store things in or on your desk? 

7.     What do you think of when you hear “smart desk”?

General Summarization as collected from 3 different interviewees:

• Is at their desk for the most part of the day for their part-time co-op, school, and gaming. This would mean that the desk should be able to serve varied purposes and have varied levels of comfort for each activity.

• The desk should be height adjustable, but it shouldn’t be manual. Also, the smart desk should be able to retain what height preference the user has set for which activity so that the user does not have to find the right height every time.

• Ability to have a to-do list incorporated within the desk.

• An interactive screen which has the controls of the desk and maybe connects to the screens being used on the desk.

• The interactive screen should not be a hindrance on using the entire flat surface of the desk if needed and should not get triggered on actions like typing or resting your hands on your desk.

• Focus Mode: Have a feature in the desk that can move all devices attached into focus mode for productive work/study sessions.

• The smart desk should be able to incorporate the user’s calendar and should have the ability to set/give reminders about important things.

• Weather/Date/Day may be a nice addition

• The user needs a smart desk that enhances their productivity so maybe incorporate apps like notion into it?

Design Exploration

The next step in the project was to explore design options based on various design challenges. Here's the design oprtions I sketched to start with:

Final User Interface

Here's what the homepage for the smart desk looks like:

The first feature is that you can turn off the UI whenever you want to utilize the entire surface area of the desk without having a screen. The implementation looks like:

You can turn the UI back on by simple clicking on the power button.

The next feature is the ability to have a calendar within the UI. Ideally, it would have the ability to integrate your outlook, google or apple calendar but due to time constraints I was unable to do so. It is an improvement I would like to work upon.

The next feature is incorporating Notion within the UI. Upon interviewing people, I found out that multiple people preferred to have productivity apps like Notion. So the UI incorporates a notion tile where you can access notion via your smart desk.

Another notable feature is the smart height adjustment. The desk comes with three modes where you can set heights according to your preference. It also gives you the option to manually change the height except for the modes.

The smart desk allows you to connect multiple devices to it and offers a "Focus" mode which sets all connected devices to do not disturb to give the user a focussed environment to work. You also get the functionality to focus individual devices.

The notes, reminders and to-do list are implemented as follows:

Demonstration Video

Here's a video to demonstrate the functionality of the user interface for the smart desk:

Code

The code for the application may be found on Github at https://github.com/AnushaChitranshi/Smart_Desk_UI.git

How to run the code:

git clone https://github.com/AnushaChitranshi/Smart_Desk_UI.git

Be sure to cd into the reactapp folder.

npm install -g

npm start

The UI should be running on your local host at port 3000.