Connect Meeting Room
Design for an ongoing performance management hub that facilitates one-on-one conversations between employees and managers.
Overview
As the process of performance management continues to evolve, its approach has become more democratized. Modern performance management involves continual one-on-one conversations between employees and managers, rather than traditional year-end reviews. TalentHub needed a platform to support this new method of manager/employee communication.
Challenge: Connect’s meeting room design needed to provide managers and employees with a central location that made it easy to accomplish the following tasks:
-
Document one-on-one conversations between managers and employees in the organization’s system of record.
-
Note action items and takeaways from meetings while providing a method for follow-up.
-
Make it easy for managers to schedule and manage multiple types of meetings.
Solution: The Connect meeting room was designed to provide an easy-to-use virtual meeting location for managers and employees. Through the analysis of user research conducted by the product owner, it was determined the best approach was a simplified design with a low learning curve.
My Role: UI Design, User Research Analysis
User Research & Wireframing Process
User interviews, with both managers and individual contributors familiar with ongoing performance management, were conducted by the product owner to uncover common user goals. These goals were used to inform the design's direction moving forward. During the interview, users were presented with an initial wireframe of the meeting room in order to record their reaction to the concept, with a focus on how closely the design matched their mental of model of what they’d expect to see.
Based on user feedback, the design team collaborated with the product owner to produce refined wireframes for each subsequent round of user testing. The meeting room design gradually progressed towards a simplified approach that resembled a chat room or note-taking application, rather than a dashboard. For example, it was determined that the meeting room need not incorporate a videoconferencing component as users were more likely to use Zoom or Teams for this functionality.
Conclusions: Users were primarily seeking simplicity in the meeting room’s design. They had the following goals:
-
Make it intuitive to use the meeting room, with a low learning curve required.
-
It should be obvious how to make an agenda item actionable.
-
Scheduling and managing one-on-one meetings needs to be quick and easy.
-
The mobile experience is important, as many users will want to review the meeting agenda on their phones.
The revised wireframe included a simplified view, with the side panel, tab navigation and video components all removed. This design was received more positively during user testing, but the prevailing feedback was that the screen was still too busy. Additionally, the idea of timing a meeting was rejected as it might prove stressful for the participants.
The final wireframe presented to users hit the mark with its simplicity. Users felt this approach matched their expected mental model for a meeting room. This version of the wireframe closely informed the MVP meeting room design.
Defining Key Workflows
Important workflows were identified and visualized as screenflows in collaboration with the product owner. This process helped to inform which interface approach would simplify the user experience by reducing the number of clicks for each action. For example, adding a meeting item made more sense as a modal popup while scheduling a meeting worked more efficiently with a step-by-step, wizard approach.
Addressing User Goals
Refining the MVP
The wireframes were refined into a high-fidelity clickable prototype that matched the look and feel of the broader talent management system the meeting room would be contained within. At this point in the process, only the most essential features identified by the product owner were included in the design in order to improve time to launch.
The meeting room was intentionally minimal in design, providing users with an intuitive blank slate on which to take notes and track action items.
As the chosen design direction was moved into high-fidelity, the primary focus was ensuring that it was still addressing the user goals identified during the research phase of the project. The product owner was able to review the updated designs with end users in order to ensure that the proposed redesign was still meeting expectations.
The intention was to always keep the user on the page when performing key actions in order to reduce the number of clicks. As much as possible, inline editing was implemented, but modal popups were used for more involved actions where user focus was required.
Actionable Meeting Takeaways
Allowing users to convert any agenda item into an action item was key. A simple flyout menu allowed for this conversion with just a couple of clicks.
Fast Adoption
The meeting room functions much like a collaborative note-taking app, allowing users to jump in and quickly get started.
Easy Meeting Management
A side panel was added to the system allowing employees to quickly view their upcoming meeting schedule and to provide managers with a central location for meeting management.
Quick Scheduling
For managers it was critical the meeting scheduling process be easy. Pre-built meeting type templates made the workflow of scheduling a meeting faster by reducing clicks.
Outcome & Learnings
The Connect module launched to a positive response from users and almost immediately began generating revenue as a logical complement to (or replacement for) traditional performance management modules. The project was a positive learning experience for the product team as we were able implement better agile methodologies by using an MVP as a starting point, and then enhancing the module through future sprints based on user feedback. This development process quickened time to launch and improved the module’s usability over time through iterative, user-driven feedback.
The mobile experience was defined during this time using responsive design principles. The intention was to retain the meeting room’s focus on simplicity and intuitiveness across all platforms with a single code base.
The initial wireframe represented a dashboard-like layout, allowing the user to perform many functions related to the meeting, compartmentalized in separate areas of the page. The initial reaction to this design from research subjects was that is was "too much" and needed to be simplified.