Meetings are toxic, not if done right.
The story of meetnotes’ creation.
If communication is the life-blood running through an organization, meetings are the arteries. They are an important part of the routine organizational activity.
Meetnotes solves one of the fundamental problem with meetings. Taking notes and making them more useful. Without proper notes, meetings are useless. The global half-life of meeting notes are fairly poor and majority is never revisited.
While designing meetnotes we looked into the basics of notes and their utility, identifying and extracting important entities and giving them parallel lives of their own for better tracking and management.
Action matters
Action items emerged by far the most important and impactful entity of the meeting notes. There were many in the race. Agendas, decisions, instructions etc. But action items proved to be the single most important entity contributing to the effectiveness of the meetings over repeated usage. Thus, we removed all the other unnecessary features from the product making them secondary and tertiary use cases and focussed on enhancing the usefulness of action items only.
Reduction is focus
Our new project was a design rethink of an earlier version of Meetnotes. On one hand we focussed on improving the usefulness of action items, making them an integral part of the meeting experience. On the other, we reduced the existing complexities of the old product. We moved timer, decisions and agenda from being important interface level features to tools that can be invoked by the user as per his/her requirement.
We also saw the natural evolution of an action item dashboard, where tracking, assigning and managing them became convenient.
Unstructured notes vs structured notes
During the design process we decided to move to an unstructured form of note taking experience. A firm believer of Larry Tesler’s ‘No modes’ philosophy, we believed the unstructured WYSWIG experience would empower our users. Not only it allowed an unobstructed and collaborative note taking experience better suited for high velocity typing, it also provided for inline task assignment (using @ handler user can assign an action item to a participant), attaching and annotating notes powerful with handlers like @, # for that does not break the natural flow but enhance the free flowing input via keyboards and keypads.
Continuous development
Post the initial design process, Meetnotes went through many stages of design and development. Many improvements were added and what we have today is a product we all are proud of. Meetnotes continue to develop and improve as more user signs up and we learn from their love, usage and hate alike :)
Special shoutout to the Hashedin team (Anshuman and Govinda for patiently listening to my design philosophies and gyan, Sanal for picking up from where I left and shaping it up to beautifully, Naga and the dev team for making sure every detail was taken care of) for their passion and dedication to build something insanely great.
Check out www.meetnotes.co
