Avalon Yang-Chen Hu

Design Process

Contextual inquiry

Our team first conducted 15 interviews which 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.

Accordingly, we held interpretation sessions to better analysis the data we gather from interviews. Then, we built an affinity diagram which reveal eight themes among our interviews:

Meeting Structure and Roles
Capturing and Sharing Information in Meetings
Meeting Frequency and Meeting Type
Meeting Room Equipment and Technology
Meeting Software and Technologies
Agendas and Meeting Dynamics
Meeting Preparation
Thoughts on Meeting Software

Based on the interview result we decided to develop a product with the following functionality:

Electronic whiteboard capabilities
Electronic note-taking and sharing capabilities
Audio capture, playback, and archiving of meetings

We also built four personas & scenarios to help concentrate on our design:

Low fidelity prototype

We began our low fidelity with paper prototype featuring out product's main functionalities:

Meeting Preparation
Meeting Capture
Meeting Organization
Meeting Follow-Up

The prototype contained complete functionality including menus and pop-up windows. After we built the initial prototype {download lo-fi PDF} , we tested it with four potential users with experience in 5-12 person meetings.

High fidelity prototype

Our Hi-Fi Prototype is radically different from our Lo-Fi Prototype. The software consists of a widget-like toolbar with four buttons and a meeting organizer. The reason for these big change is because our Lo-Fi Prototype design did too much for users who may already have many technologies to help them with meetings. For example, we had a mandatory agenda creation component in our software and many people create agendas using other programs such as Microsoft Word, Email, and GoogleDocs . Similarly, many people keep track of their meetings using scheduling tools such as iCal, GoogleCalendar, or MS Outlook so they may already have basic meeting information such as participants, date, time, topics, and location readily available and archived. We realized that we needed to take advantage of these existing softwares and focus on helping users easily organize, share, and capture meeting information such as files, notes, and important conversation or discussion points. We have retained three features from the Lo-Fi prototype, the software whiteboard, screen sharing and audio recording and screen capture of meetings.

Result and presentation

After we presenting our high fidelity prototype to the class, we made some changes as well base on the feedback. For example, we rearrange the item listed on the main panel and redesign the meeting clips functionality.

You can also know more about the result of the project by watching our short presentation slides.