Jane
Jane is a mobile-first web application designed to improve the meeting experience of both facilitators and participants.
My Role: UX Design/UI Design
Statistically, meetings waste more than $37 billion per year.* What contributes to productive and unproductive meetings?
Research
Goals
—To understand meeting communication as it applies to facilitators and participants.
—To understand the habits that contribute to productive and unproductive meetings.
—To identify the positive and negative experiences attendees have had during and after meetings.
The research revealed three personas
The organizer of everything
The organizer of everything spends a portion of her day managing the meetings of the executive staff. She is responsible for scheduling meetings, distributing agendas and following up on the completion of post-meeting tasks.
The manager of progress
The manager of progress holds multiple weekly meetings with a set of pre-established agendas. He fosters participation and encourages communication. Meeting weekly deadlines is critical to everyone involved.
The disciplined entrepreneur
The multi-discipline entrepreneur is always on the move. Her time is a valuable commodity. Meetings that stay on topic, on time and achieve actionable results are the key to her success.
Meetings that do not have agendas, active participant communication, time management and do not assign post-meeting action items contribute to unproductive meetings.
“Being prepared and a clear understanding of issues to discuss make for an effective meeting.”
“Good meetings have all participants engaged, have clear agendas and followup action items. These actions items are given specific deadlines and to be followed upon.”
“One of the challenges is just trying to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak.”
Design & Iteration
Insights to MVP
Through affinity mapping and impact metric exercises a feature set to meet our users was determined. The design process begin with agenda, time management, followup tasks/action items and participant engagement. This was followed by meeting notes and meeting summary. This core set of features would be the MVP.
Usability discoveries
Participant engagement
—Add a green outline when facilitator single taps to acknowledge they have seen the speak bubble.
—Make the speak-bubble solid green with a number indicating that the participant is now in a queue to speak when the current speaker finishes. Allow the moderator to queue multiple participants to speak.
—Add a tap and hold or tap/hold and swipe gesture to the speak bubble so the moderator can easily remove the speak bubble from a participant once they have spoken. Removing a speak bubble also reorders the queue.
Assign tasks
—Update the agenda icon.
—Update the assign tasks icon.
Meeting timer
—Remove the play and pause buttons participants’ view.
—Add a countdown timer to the meeting start.
—Add seconds to the meeting timer.
Exiting a meeting
—Prompt Yes or No on final exit.
—Add button to facilitator meeting wrap up screen. (Review Tasks Assigned, Review My Notes, Exit Meeting).
—Add button to participants’ meeting wrap up screen. (Review Assigned Tasks, Review My Notes, Exit Meeting).
First-load instructions
—Create instructions on the first load for Meetings, Facilitator, Participants and Meeting Wrap Up screens.
Additional iterations and usability testing required
Participant engagement
—On the participant’s screen, the Speak Bubble was interpreted correctly but more iteration and testing is required on the facilitator’s screen to manage speak requests.
—When assigning tasks by tapping on a participant’s icon, additional functionality is required to assign a task to more than one participant.
“I wish that I could have this now. My job requires me to follow up on post-meeting tasks and that’s always problematic.”
– Usability Test Participant
