Efficient Meeting Room Scheduling

Streamlining Your Office Time
MY ROLE
User Research
UI Design
Prototyping
Design Iteration
Usability Testing
Visual Design
TEAM
3 other Interactive Designers
TIMELINE
Jan - Mar 2024
TOOL
Figma
Adobe Creative Suite
CONTEXT

Overview

‍MeetEase is desktop dashboard designed to help office managers efficiently schedule and manage meeting room bookings using AI. Through out this project, I was responsible for the user research, develop product features, presentation decks, final wireframes UI design and user testing. It was an incredible experience to fully apply my research, storytelling and interaction design skills.
50%
Time spent on selecting meeting time slots
20%
Meeting room selection time
300+
Insights gathered from managers

Why is it important today ?

Hybrid work models have made in-person meetings highly essential for productive discussions and faster decision-making. Without a structured booking system, multiple teams attempting to use the same room simultaneously can lead to ineffective collaboration, wasted time, ghost meetings, and overall business inefficiency.
THE PROBLEM

Office managers often struggle to find available meeting rooms quickly.

Let's looks at some facts

Project Goal

To design an experience for booking and managing meeting rooms that allow everyone in the office to find the best meeting room efficiently, reducing 50% of the time employees spend on coordinatinga meeting room.

— Introducing—

A meeting room booking system

Meeting Schedule Overview

A clear and intuitive display of all staged meetings with the flexibility to toggle between a weekly overview and today’s schedule.

Automatic Time Slot Suggestion

Users can easily determine available time slots using AI. The system recommends the five best meeting time slots based on colleagues' schedules, ensuring optimal meeting times for all parties involved.

Room Selection Filter

By aligning room selection filters with users' natural decision-making processes, the interface allows users to easily select criteria based on their preferences. Direct booking from the timetable allows intuitive selection of both time and meeting room.

Interactive Floor Plan

Enables seamless switching between list and map views, allowing users to quickly identify room locations, availability, and resources through color-coded statuses.

Integration with Group Chat Systems

Enables seamless sharing of meeting links with all attendees in just one click, reducing manual effort, improving coordination, and ensuring efficient communication.
Hold up - How did we get here? Let's revisit the process ...
RESEARCH

Competitor Analysis

How can we stand out and create a competitive distinction?

Key Insight

Competitors require manual input for scheduling and attendee availability, which can be time-consuming.

Opportunity

Streamline the meeting room scheduling process with intelligent automation and mprove integration with communication tools for a seamless user experience.

To understand how managers schedule meeting rooms in office spaces and the challenges they face, we conducted interviews with 12 managers from large organizations.

Some User's Voice From Interviews

💬They say

I want the system to offer real-time updates, it is crucial for efficiently scheduling meetings with multiple attendees, as finding a suitabletime slot can be time-consuming.

❔They mean

Quick Attendance Coordination

🙆They want

I need to check the attendees availability as I need to find a suitable timeslot.

💬They say

I usually consider the size of the meeting because it's important to make sure that everyone has a place to sit.

❔They mean

Efficient filtering

🙆They want

I need to prioritize room size because I need to choose a suitable room for the team

💬They say

I would chat in group chats or channels to communicate meeting room information updates because it is quick andconvenient.

❔They mean

Instant meeting update with group

🙆They want

I need to communicate meeting-related information on group chat or channels because it is more direct

IDEATION
To explore potential solutions, we initiated a comprehensive brainstorming session where we utilized stickers to identify feasible features and we also used SCAMPER technique to find more opportunities.

Then, we prioritized these features based on their impact and urgency, ensuring that we focused on the most critical elements.

Develop the product features

✨Through this process, we finally came up with four key design solutions

🚀Product Work flow

Based on varying user needs, we designed two user flows for booking meeting rooms. One flow starts with selecting the meeting time, while the other prioritizes selecting the room first. This way, we make scheduling more flexible and efficient, suiting everyone's preferences and making the process smoother.

Step 1: Select meeting time

Step 2: Select meeting room

Step 3: Share meeting link

DESIGN

Wireframes Transition

Homepage Interface

1. Our team refined the sidebar, making it cleaner by using simple icons and providing more space for meeting agenda.

2. Moving the overview of daily meetings from the corner to the center of the page, making it more prominent and ensuring users are more aware of their meeting schedules.

Calendar Scheduling Interface

1. Our team moved meeting details like title and time to the left side of the page for better visibility.

2. We enabled toggling between week and day views and added quick date selection icons. These changes make the scheduling process more intuitive and user-friendly.

Meeting Room List Interface

1. Filter chips were added under each selected filter, allowing users to easily remove filters based on their preferences. This change provides a more customizable and streamlined filtering experience.

Interactive Floor Plan Interface

1. We placed the floor map on the right side and moved the meeting room details to the left, aligning with natural eye movement patterns for better readability.

2. Replace the tab buttons for room list and map view at the top of the page with a switch button in the upper right corner. This change simplifies navigation and making it easier to switch view.
Design Iteration

Usability Testing

To evaluate the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the meeting booking system in helping big company managers schedule and organize meetings with minimal effort to meet their specific needs, we conducted a user test during the mid-fidelity stage with five managers.

Automatic time slot suggestion
It reduced the total processing time by 50%
Room Selection Filter
It reduced the total processing time by 20%
Interactive Floor Plan
The entire process only takes about 20 seconds
Integration with group chat systems
The entire process takes about 15 seconds

Reflection

MeetEase was my first time working on a B2B UX project. One of the highlights was interviewing real users, the managers, and gaining insights into the practical challenges they face when booking meeting rooms in a corporate setting. It was gratifying to see how our design solutions could potentially make their lives easier.

✏️Some lessons I learned

Storytelling builds emotional connections
Research can uncover opportunities
keep iteration
Leveraging existing resources

🤔Challenges we met

One significant challenge was designing a system that stood out from existing booking systems while still incorporating essential features. Balancing innovation with practicality was a delicate act.
‍
Another challenge was the tight timeframe—we had to go from initial research to final deliverables in just six weeks.

🙌if we had more time...

We would have done more user testing to really dig into what the managers need and keep refining our designs based on their feedback.

Thank you! :)
Feel free to check the final solution prototype here

Mobei Qian :)

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