Milestone 2

Interviews

We conducted 15 interviews between 9/28 and 10/6.Our interviewees came overwhelmingly from the technology industry, as well as the non-profit sector, consulting, and the medical industry. Our interviewees were both meeting organizers and meeting participants and participate in 5-12 person meetings daily, weekly, and/or monthly.Interviews ranged from 30 min to an hour and were conducted in-person and over the phone by one interviewer.

Interpretation Session

We conducted interpretation sessions to analyze interviewee information. We created affinity notes for each interview and broke each interviewee’s time into three sections: Through this process, we gained insight into how interviewees prepare and review information before meetings. We also uncovered barriers to information sharing and comprehension during and after meetings. We created a consolidated sequence model and a chart of common meeting artifacts that help us conceptualize the flow of information through the meeting preparation, convening, and follow-up processes. We have included the files here for download.

PDF Files: Sequence Model | Arfifacts

Affinity Diagram

After our interpretation sessions, we built an affinity diagram which revealed 8 themes among our interviews: An outline of our affinity diagram is available here: Link

Our key findings after building the diagram were that there are many difficulties with note-taking and note-sharing during/after meetings. We also discovered commonly used meeting technology and equipment that people enjoy and wish to improve or extend.

Design Ideas

Based on our interviews, we are going to develop a product with the following functionality:
  1. Electronic whiteboard capabilities
  2. Electronic note-taking and sharing capabilities
  3. Audio capture, playback, and archiving of meetings
We found the following products that have successfully implemented some of our design ideas. We plan to test these products out before we prototype to get a sense of how other meeting software products implement our design ideas. You can view this work as Milestone 3.5 Competitive Research.

Milestones

The Affinity Diagram
The Affinity Diagram