Improve hybrid meeting experience via enhanced digital and physical interactions.
Redesigning the Webex meeting experience to enable design professionals to effectively plan, connect, and manage in a hybrid remote setting.
March - May 2022
Develop a smart meeting room solution that seamlessly blends digital interfaces with the physical environment to enhance the collaborative and interactive experience in a meeting room setting.
Xijia Zhang
Xiaoyuan Zhang
Ever since the pandemic, every organization needs a new operating model for hybrid work. As a design professional who works in the architecture/Landscape architecture industry, I’ve been observing and experiencing the changes and challenges that the flexible work world has brought to us.
At my company, we use Webex as the major virtual meeting platform and one of the digital collaboration tools. However, under the hybrid working mode, design professionals have been experiencing difficulties in collaborating throughout the meeting process. They are looking for better solutions to bridge the gap before, during, and after the meeting process to work seamlessly with colleagues and clients.
How might we improve the Webex experience to better serve hybrid meeting collaboration for design professionals?
What is Webex?
Webex is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Cisco. Webex offers workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration.
Why Redesign?
Webex desktop app has created this digital meeting platform with many useful features, but still, some problems and frustrations would occur during the collaboration process. As a designer who participates 2-3 meetings per day, I found：
1.It’s difficult to work seamlessly with colleagues and clients under this hybrid working mode.
2.I have to use Outlook to check other attendees’ schedules to book meetings.
3.I cannot see participants’ reactions while presenting remotely and to have effective interaction.
4.I have to use multiple platforms to sketch, save, share, and manage the design ideas that were brainstormed during the meeting. There was no solution for flexible scheduling either.
At the same time, many of my colleagues encountered similar or different issues by using Webex. Therefore, I set out to reimagine the Webex desktop app and improve the experience in any way I could.
Besides my own experiences with Webex, I wanted to understand other users’ experiences to identify their pain points and which aspects of Webex that are needed to be updated.
To do so, I started my user research by conducting user interviews with 10 colleagues in my company, which vary in years of experience from entry-level designers to principals, age groups from 23 to 60-year-old to understand what Teams satisfied and frustrated them during the hybrid collaborating process.
To kick off our research, we initiated a comprehensive competitive analysis, delving into the current market landscape to gain insights into the different aspects of various products.
Insights:
All products provide a basic function for scheduling meeting, but few of them offers the convenience of viewing guests’ schedules.
All products support video meetings, but not all provide a good user experience to switch different layouts, especially in a presenting mode.
All products provide real-time collaboration tools for online/hybrid meetings, but most whiteboard products don’t have an efficient way to document meeting notes.
When the meeting is delayed, no product solve the communication problem between the people inside the meeting room and the guest outside.
Then, I mapped the experience from the typical designer’s perspective to understand interaction with touchpoints.
After summarizing and analyzing the interview results with my teammates, we identified 4 pain points throughout the 3 phases of the meeting:
Before Meeting
Difficult to accommodate every attendee's availability.
During Meeting
Can't see participant's reaction while presenting remotely.
After Meeting
Unable to adjust meeting duration flexibly based on real-time needs.
To tackle the challenges posed by the current hybrid meeting experience, our design goal is:
to empower design professionals to effectively plan, connect, and manage within the hybrid remote setting.
By conducting user interviews and gathering feedback from users, We identified that the current problems of real-time screen sharing from a presenter view include:
1.Hard to change the layout of the participants’ window as a presenter
2.Tool Bar location is fixed at the top and hard to move or hide.
Iteration1 - View window redesign
1st round exploration
Prioritize the buttons of different layout options and maximize the participants’ window so the presenter can see 9 people at the same time.
Final Screen
Can't see participant's reaction while presenting remotely.
Iteration2 - Tab Bar Redesign
In the tab bar design, we initially recommended a minimum layout size to accommodate the presenter, but this created difficulty in identifying the speaker. To resolve this, we made adjustments in the iteration by adding the name of the current speaker.
Final Solution
Solution
We rethink user experience in the physical meeting room and develop a new feature for Webex - a smart meeting room solution with in-room and mount-on-wall tablet panels to unlock greater engagement between team and team, people and space. Based on the research insights, we started to propose user flows focusing on two groups of users and illustrate the paths they would go through.
User flows
Team A:
1.Meeting inside the conference room;
2.Would like to extend the meeting and update other teams seamlessly.
Team B:
1.Waiting outside the conference room;
2.Would like to politely inform Team A if they go over their scheduled time.
Final Solution
Core Features of in-room meeting control panel:
1 . Extend the meeting by one click;
2 . Automatic time reminder when meeting will end soon;
3 . Real-time communication with upcoming meeting’s participants.
Core Features of mount-on-wall scheduling display:
1 . Check real-time availability with a color-coded status bar
2 . Scheduling display with time-reminder and message buttons
Reflection
