Designing a meeting scheduling & meeting room booking app.

Some Assumptions

• All employees within Acme have Gsuite ids, and use Slack channels & Gmail for all internal communication.
• Each meeting room has a biometric device (eg; fingerprint sensor) installed at the door, where the employees can check-in before attending the meeting.
• Each meeting room has a tablet device installed that can show details about availability, facilities, ongoing meeting etc.

Why do we need another calendar app?

• There is a plethora of scheduling / calendar apps available that let you schedule meetings & also get timely reminders & updates.
• Also, there are a lot of useful plugins available for Slack and other collaboration platforms that let you integrate calendar functionalities.
• Therefore I needed to understand all the problems associated with the current procedures of scheduling & attending meetings in different companies.

USER INTERVIEWS

I conducted 3 telephonic interviews with employees from different sectors - automobile (Mercedes Benz), software (Microsoft) & FMCG (ITC). My aim was to learn about the steps involved in scheduling a meeting & booking a meeting room, & understand the underlying problems.

This was the rough questionairre that I had prepared:

• Walk me through the last time you scheduled a meeting.
• What are the different agendas for the meetings?
• How do discussions about meeting timings & attending members take place?
• How are meeting rooms booked? What all facilities are required during a meeting?

Insights

All of the interviewees that I talked to told me that their companies used a combination of a communication platform & a scheduling platform for meetings (or either 1 of the 2).

• Meeting agendas range from brainstorming sessions, standups, product launches, announcement meetings etc.
• Facilities like TV screens, projectors, charging ports, mics, podium are required according to the agenda of the meeting & the number of people in attendance.
• Attendees in the meeting are usually decided according to the work that has to be discussed. Sometimes dept. wide or company wide meetings also take place.
• Small meetings (< 15 members) are usually scheduled 1-2 days ahead. Big meetings are mostly scheduled a week before the actual date.

Existing Scenarios

I identified the following 3 scenarios occurring while scheduling meetings in companies (based on my interviews) :

I noted down the positive and negatives of each of these scenarios, and came to the conclusion that Scenario 3 is the best scenario.

User Journey

1. Discussing & finalising meeting agenda, meeting timings, attendees etc.

2. Selecting a time slot in which all attending members are free & scheduling a meeting at the time.

3. Booking a meeting room according to the no. of people attending, facilities required, availability of rooms etc.

4. Notifications sent to every attending member about the time, venue & other detais of the meeting.

Use Cases

These are the use cases I could think of based on my research. For the sake of this task I have focussed on use cases 1, 2 & 3.

Why Slack Plugin + App?

• Slack as a communication platform is very useful for discussions related to scheduling meeting.
• But it is difficult to incorporate room booking features in a Slack plugin.
• A Slack plugin + standalone app system reduces the difficulty in switching between platforms.
• Therefore, I decided to go ahead with this system.

Meetings Screen

1. A user will want to see his scheduled meetings on the Meetings screen (Also the landing screen of the app).
2. He/she will also want to view any updates regarding meetings he has been added in (Eg: rescheduling, cancellation etc.)
3. The Meetings screen also provides the option to create a new meeting (Schedule + Book room)

Creating a meeting

Booking room for already scheduled meeting

• There are scenarios where one might not want to schedule a meeting on the app & add all attendees after already having discussed and finalised the meeting verbally or elsewhere.
• For such scenarios there must be an option to just book a room without having to schedule a meeting.
• This feature will also be useful for urgent/impromptu meetings where there might not be enough time to schedule a meeting first (or even discuss about it).

Notifications & Reminders

• Notifications will be sent to the employee when he/she is added to a meeting.
• Reminders will be sent before a meeting to ensure that the employee reaches the meeting in time.
• Alert will be sent to the employee if he doesnt checkin at the meeting room in time (maybe 5 mins after the meeting starts).
• Notifications will also be sent in the case of recheduling, cancellation or updation of venue (meeting room).
• Push notifications will sent to the employee to confirm his availability (Going? Yes, No, Maybe)

Office Navigation for New Employees

• New employees will generally not be familiar with the layout of the office building, & therefore might face problems in navigating to the required meeting rooms.
• I thought of Augmented Reality based navigation as a solution.
• AR could add some delight to the process to going to a meeting & will also help the user navigate better.

What more can be done?

• In this assignment I haven't taken setting up recurring meetings into consideration. That is also a considerably important use case and should be designed for.
• The Augmented Reality idea could also be extended to viewing rooms while booking (For eg: having a 3d model of each room).
• The interface for the tablet device installed outside each meeting room displaying booking info etc. should also be designed, as it is also a part of the overall experience.