30-minute vs. 1-hour meetings
An enterprise social network experiment
I work at a large software company so I’m able to use many in-house software products. The most advanced one is Kontur.Staff, SKB Kontur’s enterprise social network, which is far superior in many aspects than recently introduced Workplace by Facebook.
We routinely use Kontur.Staff to book 130+ shared zones across 20+ offices throughout the country: mostly, meeting rooms—but also conference rooms, gyms, sports fields, and the barbecue place at our new lakeside location.
One day I noticed something odd: the default booking time was 1 hour. It didn’t make lots of sense to have 1-hour defaults but noone could tell why it was so. Even Microsoft Outlook — what can be more enterprise-ish? — defaults to 30-minute events.
My hypothesis was that a significant share of Kontur.Staff users rely on the default duration and accept what the user interface suggests. Although there’re better ways to spread the idea that meetings are toxic, providing sensible defaults looked like a reasonable step.
So I asked to change the default booking time to 30 munites. The team behind Kontur.Staff ran the poll to check if the proposed change looks okay for everyone. 30-minute meetings outdid 1-hour meetings 50 % to 47 %, and the remaining 3 % were for 15-munite meetings. So the team readily changed the defaults to 30 minutes.
The last part was to wait, collect the data and check if my hypothesis was correct. Having 130+ meeting rooms means there’re thousands of data points per week so the result is trustworthy. Here’s how meetings distribution by their duration has been changing week to week:
About 4,5 % of all meetings converted into 30-minute meetings. It means that about 9 % of 1-hour meetings got 30 munites shorter, as the share of longer-than-one-hour meetings stays the same. At the company scale it means thousands of hours rescued for productive work. I don’t really think that anyone considered an impact like this designing that meeting room booking feature.
But it’s not as important as the following outcome for everyone who create and evolve software products:
Choose default values and user interface states carefully. Don’t underestimate their impact on users of your product.
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