Interaction Design — A coursera journey
Probably you all have experienced it already in your working life. The day starts and you immediately have your first meeting. Right after that first one, you have a second one and this is how your workday looks like. However! In some meetings interesting points are touched upon and you also took up some tasks to look into for next week. But, can you even find the time?
My research started with needfinding. The mission to redesign how we experience or interact with time. Within the Netherlands people are really punctual and strict on timings. In their personal live and within their working live. During a normal working day a lot of the time that you ‘have’ to be present is spent in meetings. Meetings often are planned for an hour and sometimes more. Making a meeting shorter is somehow not possible because a person has claimed your time and your time becomes their time. My research will focus on how the interaction with time around meetings and claiming time could be changed so that people feel less caged.
The Point of view that I’ve found was the following:
People value meetings if they give them proper decisions, actions & getting everyone alligned but for reaching those goals they need time for preperation and processing afterwards. Therefore time before and after should become sacred.
In the light of this Point of View I started developing a new tool for the planning of meetings.
The tool works pretty similar as tools already in place to organize meetings (outlook, gmail etc.) The important adjustment I have done is that now based on a role somebody must fulfil during a meeting also time before and after the meeting is blocked in the agenda so that people can be better prepared and are less in a rush.
The app I have tested and the explanation given to the users was the following.
In working life we have a lot of meetings during the day. In my previous research I found that many people experienced that they did not had enough time to prepare or they found that others were not well prepared. To create a solutions for that problem I developed an application. In this application you can create appointments as you were used to do but here you also appoint roles to attendees. Based on roles other times in the agenda of the specific person is found so that he or she has the time blocked necessary to make the meeting successful. To test the application I want to ask you if you can walk through it and see if you would be able to create a meeting based on this application.”
The test gave me new insights and based on that I have added comment fields so that people could give more explanation of what they expected from that person in the specific role.
What showed during the A/B test is that the testers were not used to testing prototypes within powerpoint. In the movies it can be seen that they did not start the presentation and therefore the hyperlinks were not activated.
But luckily participants also gave the feedback that they loved the prototype. They suggested a few changes like:
· Make the design sleeker and more clean
· Adding profiles to the application so that participants have their own profile. (including pictures and short bio)
· Make it kind of like a social media application
· Explain the use better
Unfortunate there is no difference to be found between version A and version B for this test. Therefore the real working prototype should be developed with google analytics to check these responses better in a bigger testing group.
A participant indicated that he or she definitely would use this for the school club that I am a part of. He or she can see all of the classmates being excited to receive their roles for a club meeting and everything would be much more productive.
Conclusion is that the idea is received well, people would use it, it just needs a lot of work visually as well as fundamentally to get it to the place it needs to be.
So the course has given me a lot of valuable insights and for me the next step is to get the product into place!