Meetings Done on Time.

My Role: UX Researcher | Duration: 1 1/2 weeks | Project Status: Ongoing

With people working more at home due to COVID-19, the work ethos of the everyday user is slowly changing, and it’s important that remote communication evolves alongside it. Without the pressure of having a watchful eye over their screen, users enjoy a more autonomous workday, and value overall productivity over the pressure of having to “always be online.” This means that they like to take more breaks, and enjoy sneaking in more personal time (eg. workouts or walks) between meetings. While it seems that users are relaxing more, there is also more of an emphasis to make the most of the time dedicated to productivity.

With a heavy emphasis on remote communication, Zoom meetings are becoming the cornerstone of a productive workday for many companies. However, they become tedious and repetitive when they lack initiative and structure.

We felt there was a need to integrate a feature that keeps meetings productive and within schedule, and allows for seamless communication between users and their managers or teams.

“How might we allow people to take more control of their workday?”

Explorations

For this project, we wanted to understand what users’ workday looked like, and how meetings played a role in their productivity. We wanted to following processing in order to best test our problem statement and validate our prototype:

The Methodology

We conducted 5 interviews that ran about 45 min each, and focused on a group that all currently worked from home in different sectors.

We took the information we gathered, and began to create an affinity map by organizing the themes into groups based on their relationships.

We felt that our findings could be synthesized into three key takeaways:

Users feel that there are a lot of issues that pause productivity and make tasks longer to complete

Users want management to redefine work from home work flow and constantly assess to make it more efficient

Users want meetings to be efficient and important to the work day

The Persona

Hello, my name is Charlie!

We took the data from the affinity mapping, and created the persona Charlie. In many of the interviews, redefining the work flow in a remote environment seemed to be the main frustration for many of the users. In order for Charlie to align with our users, we wanted his pain points to be efficiency based.

Using our persona, we began to further narrow down the problem. We began to think,

“How might we create a meeting that allows all the participants to stay on topic and on time?”

Focusing on the insight that users felt that meetings weren’t efficient, I began to brainstorm features that would address this issue. I felt that a feature that had the following features would enhance the users’ experience:

• Create a schedule of meeting key points that host can edit and participants can view
• Ability to manage the meeting during the call
• Discussion Board where offline conversations can take place

Ideation and Concept Testing

For this study, I will only go over two prototypes (lo-fidelity and mid-fidelity), and one usability testing for each. For the usability testing, I had 5 participants, where I would ask for their impressions and have them work out 3 scenarios and tasks.

I began to move forward with how the feature would look and function. I did three rounds of brainstorming before moving forward with the Lo Fidelity prototype, and testing to see how people responded to the initial design.

Following the user testing for the Lo-fi prototype, I learned that:

• Users don’t 100% like the concept of the timer. Based on their experiences, they know that there will be many times where they will be running behind and associated with anxiety.
• Users liked the concept of a discussion board to tie up loose ends when people need to move onto the next topic
• Users liked that they could have an overview of the topics covered during a meeting

Taking the lo fi notes into account, I moved forward to the mid fidelity prototype, which can be found below.

These screens show how a topic can be added to the agenda

Call Screen Redesigned

Secondary Features

Testing the mid- fidelity prototype, people loved that the design was simple and easy to follow, and many felt that they would use a feature like this for their zoom calls.

Recommendations and Implementations

Moving forward toward the high fidelity prototype, there will need to be concerns addressed about how intuitive it will be to use the timer. There will also need to be another user test to determine the usability when the timer is in motion.