FleetingMeeting: The Status Meeting Redevised

Last week an acquaintance and I were talking about bringing innovation into the corporate meeting place. He works at a video conferencing company, and he brought up the topic of gamifying a business meeting, which I thought had some interesting design challenges. So, I spent a couple of hours on a thought experiment of designing a simple gamified meeting app.

Goal & Areas of Focus

Goal

Design the UX of a corporate meeting with:

Gamification
Video Conferencing Technology
High participant engagement

Areas of Focus

Status Meetings

Frequent
Usually boring

Distributed Teams

Telecommuters
Regional offices

Personas

Hamid

Manager of a team of 10
Runs weekly team meeting of status + team topics
Usually rushed (hard to find time to prepare)
Struggling to keep team engaged

Hamid’s Team

The loud ones: Glenn, Padmini
The quiet ones: Laura, Vickus
The ones barely there: Jennifer, Seth
The ones off-topic: Dan, Rose
The others on task: Lillian, Adam

Problem Space

Hamid comes into the conference room one minute before the meeting starts. He knows he should have sent out a prepared agenda, but now the meeting is starting and he hasn’t even created one.	low leadership motivation
Only half of the team is online, the other half straggles in minutes later.	low team motivation
He has the team do an “around the horn” update.	default process mentality
Seth and Jennifer pretend to be taking notes but are actually doing email and checking Facebook.	team disengaged
Glenn interrupts Vickus’ update, and Rose adds a comment that takes things way off topic.	unproductive interactions
Everyone else is either too sleepy or bored to notice.

Gamification

..is “employing game mechanics in non-game environments.”

– Brian Burke, Gartner Inc.

Game Elements

Game Board – levels
Game Pieces – players
Prize – badges, money, points, status
Strategy – rules, competition, time limit, luck

Proposed Solution

I decided on the idea of taking a common story and applying it as a game in the corporate setting. Aesop’s Tortoise and the Hare is widely known, and it creates a good basis for challenging a team to work together to finish early.

Game Board

Overlay app on video conference screen
Visual map (agenda items = landmarks)

Game Pieces

Tortoise = time
Hare = team
[for day-to-day situations, I think it best for co-workers to compete together rather than against each other]

Prize

Leave early

Strategy

Moderator can input agenda details
– E.g. Number of items and time per item
The team can work together on this to get it right before the game starts
The objective is to finish agenda before meeting time is up
Tortoise is dynamically moving across screen

Mockups

Comments

This is the home screen of the iPad app, with the video panels of each meeting member below
Users select length of meeting (minutes, or perhaps time when meeting should end)
If the optional agenda is defined, the agenda items become landmarks in the game

Comments

When the game begins, the tortoise and the hare are at the starting line
The hare immediately jumps to the first landmark (agenda item 1)
The tortoise gradually moves from start to finish, reaching the finish line exactly at the end of the countdown

Comments

At each landmark, a popup appears where notes (e.g. action items) can be recorded
These notes could be emailed out after the meeting and stored for review in subsequent meetings
The timer shows how much time remains for that stage, and it becomes negative when the team running late (i.e. when the tortoise takes the lead)
A progress bar at the bottom of the timer shows the overall amount of “distance” left in the race

Remarks

We all know that Aesop’s tortoise won the race, but I suppose this game creates the rematch. “Faster and steady” should win this race.

This is a very simple example of how we can make meetings more engaging. I don’t feel like this initial iteration is compelling enough to create “high participant engagement”, but I think it succeeds as a tool for helping teams work together to adhere to an agenda and be aware of “drift”–ultimately leading to better timeliness. I think it also gives teams enough of a playful boost that they might smile and have more fun at work.