Noter — A UI/UX Concept in Improved Minutes-of-Meeting System for Engineering and Construction Practices
Meetings are meant to be efficient, concise and straight-to-point, so why not transform table view into card view and use simple gestures to make quick decisions and boost up meeting efficiency?
Meetings are important — a bunch of people are called to gather and discuss things that matter a lot to day-to-day activities in business. However getting everything that has been discussed in a meeting down in a neat and organizable way is not an easy task, especially in this tool-abundant world. There are numerous note taking methods available online and offline. People from various industries may use their preferred approaches to jot down the ideas that came to their mind, and record the actions as a takeaway from the meeting. While I’m a process engineering in construction industry, people tend to use the simplest form of database they can get from pre-installed softwares on their laptop: MS Excel, and the standard Minutes-of-Meeting (abbreviated as “MOM” in the following context) it looks like this:
There’s no doubt that Excel is an excellent tool to hold information like what a database will normally do, and it has a richer visual content to help user navigate and manipulate the data stored within each cell unit.
Design process
The idea of redesigning the current engineering MOM system came to my mind on a sleepless night. While I was lying on the bed thinking about the packed meetings I had gone through at work, there are piles of information awaiting me to be recorded down properly and sent to all attendees for their review and reference. I recall a sentence that my lead engineer told me at the start of the project, “Your meeting note should be 90% completed before you walking out from the meeting room” — yes things are easy to say so but hard to achieve. In engineering industry, problems-solving the major goal for all who attended a meeting discussion. Decisions are to be made and tasks are to be assigned — usually with a assignee and due. In most of the meetings that I organized, I am the moderator and note taker at the same time, and that work can be piled up if you got three or four meetings one by another in the whole afternoon. Organizing these notes sometimes just get very painful.
A few sparks of idea came to my mind: what if we can treat noting down and review meeting results as fun as we play Tinder? What if every meeting task is represented in a card format to be approve and closed, or postponed? What if every task is automatically assigned with some keyword tags for better searching? What if the system is smart enough to predict your intention when you only type the first character of your note? What if…?
I began to noodle on this thing, and the process of crafting ideas was fascinating.
Requirements Gathering
First of all there is a need to know who are the users of such MOM system and what requirements they would probably need to help them achieve their tasks with efficiency. Apparently I am one of the major users, just like others engineers working on the same project, we are holding numerous engineering discussions everyday with clients, vendors, contractors, and even visitors from top management.
I’ve done a brainstorming session with two colleagues on these topics regarding to the current MOM system:
- Necessary components of an task item entry
- Pros and cons on current excel-based MOM system
These findings helped me to identify what directions and features I should be looking at to aim a better MOM system design. Engineers usually prefer fast pacing, efficient way to jot down their thoughts and they should be using as few clicks as possible to get the action updated. Too many clicking around will not only annoying meeting attendees (which was told by our client before), but also making the note taker/moderator lost in his own world of operating the laptop, while missing out the key points being discussed.
The design and feature of Tinder card “decide-and-swipe” had my attention right away when I was thinking about the action items from MOM. It is quite similar that for every discuss item during the meeting, a quick decision will be made: whether it’s approved and closed/logged into logbook, or it’s discussed but needed to be postponed to another date to revisit again. The latter will continue appearing on the open item list till it is resolved in the coming discussions. Based on this I had made my very first low-fidelity prototype:
Designing Alternatives
There are a number of ways to organize the UI for better user experience. Texts can be in different sizes to bring hierarchy of information listed on an action card; and similarly various colors can be used for different categories associated with the task.
Prototyping
With the help of Adobe Experience Design I came up with some high fidelity prototype and built up interactions within these interfaces:
You can view and interact with the prototype via this link:
Evaluation
Noter should be a cloud based system so that every single entry, pieces of information and updates on each action card will be save spontaneously, without manual save them online or offline (this is also one of the problems addressed during requirement gathering stage). The UI is still a very novel design which requires much future “polish” to ensure all user needs and requirements are captured and designed. Eventually the roadmap of this application will bring in more engagement with users throughout naturalistic observation, surveys, focus groups and interviews.
While the prototype being still rough and preliminary, the idea of improving the current MOM system that me and other engineers are using somehow enlightened me about what we can do as an individual to rethink, re-create and improve something that we already have. After all as long as an object or a product has users to engage with, there’s always room for improvement.
This is the very first of user experience study that I tried with a systematic and structured approach. As Sir Jony Ive said, ‘… the role of a designer is to actually look and question, and that’s where the inspiration comes from — by just observing what we do and what we perhaps could do, and that we might want to do…’, observing and thinking about alternatives of design is an important step in design thinking cycle. Ideas are extremely fragile and therefore you need to note them down whenever and wherever you are. As a personal habit I am always keeping a small A6 notebook with me at all the time, just in case of any ideas coming to my mind, they would be easily jotted down. They can come to you at anytime: during shower, commuting to work, or even happening in your dream. You need to be sensitive enough to capture the tiniest detail of them, and bit by bit you will assembly the ideas together to see a bigger picture — that’s where your design should be heading to.
Steve Wang
Graphic and UX Designer
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