DURATION
4 Months (Jan- April)
Optimizing Online Meetings with AI
This project, done with a Lafayette, Indiana-based startup called DEFI Design to address online meeting challenges, led my team and I to design Convoke—a web app that leverages AI-driven scheduling and collaboration tools to streamline meetings, eliminate inefficiencies, and enhance team productivity through personalized agendas, reminders, and pre-meeting workspaces.
UI/UX Design
Company
DEFI Design
Role
UI/UX Designer
Focus
AI Integration, Producitivity, Web-App Design, Emapthy & Journey Mapping
Team
Myself & 6 Other UX Designers
Defining the Problem Space
"OMG, this could’ve been an email!" How many times have you sat through a meeting and thought this exact phrase? Meetings are meant to foster collaboration and drive productivity, but when poorly planned or unnecessary, they often achieve the opposite.
In fact, 47% of professionals in the U.S. report wasting a staggering 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings. That's an entire 372 hours per year per employee—time that could have been spent on meaningful, impactful work. For companies, these inefficiencies result in financial losses of up to $54 million annually for large organizations.
We realized this issue isn’t just about wasted time—it’s about declining employee satisfaction, broken workflows, and lost opportunities for productivity. Addressing this problem has the potential to improve the day-to-day lives of employees while saving companies substantial costs.
Who is Affected By this Problem? (User Group)
Managers and Team Leads
These individuals are tasked with organizing, facilitating, and leading meetings. Their focus is to make decisions, ensure productivity, and guide their teams. However, their challenge is balancing the need to collaborate with avoiding wasted time.
Employees and Team Members
Employees attend meetings to share updates, contribute to discussions, and collaborate on goals. For them, meetings can feel like a disruption to their workflows, especially if they fail to add value or clarity.
Gathering Insights from the User Group (Primary Research)
We conducted 13 interviews, 6 with people who mostly host meetings and 7 who mostly attend meetings and asked them a set of questions with our interview protocols to gather insights upon their thoughts on online meetings
TAKEAWAYS
High Meeting Frequency
Participants reported attending an average of 2 to 5 meetings per day, contributing to cognitive fatigue and time constraints.
Length Impacts Focus
Longer meetings led to a noticeable drop in participant focus and quality of outcomes, especially when they lacked structure.
Clarity Drives Engagement
Meetings without clear agendas or objectives resulted in low participation and confusion among attendees.
Relevance Affects Productivity
Many participants felt they were frequently invited to meetings that were irrelevant to them, disrupting workflow and productivity.
Preparedness Matters
Poor preparation by hosts or attendees was seen as a major cause of delays and ineffective meetings.
More People, More Distractions
Larger meeting sizes often led to more distractions and difficulty maintaining attention across the group.
Analyzing the Insights
To further improve our understanding, we affinity diagramed pain points on empathy maps to organize what our users think, feel, do, and say. With these pain points in mind, we also created a journey map to get a whole comprehensive understanding of the entire user experience and uncover opportunities for improvements based on pain points.
Understanding the Market (Competetive Analysis)
To understand how other companies are providing a solution for this, we performed a competitive analysis. We performed two types of analyses- one of solutions with AI integrated in them and one of solutions without ai integrations. We mapped out what our best competitors are doing and we took inspiration from them and analyzed what is not already provided and ideated accordingly for our web-app,
Our Main Research Question- What features, functionalities, and user experiences are offered by existing video conferencing platforms, and how do these compare in meeting the needs and preferences of users?
TAKEAWAYS
Transcription Feature
Almost all integrations automated meeting recording and transcription, as well as having an AI feature that helped streamline certain tasks. Users benefit from transcriptions as they have the ability to highlight key moments for future reference.
User Flow and User Experience
Based on the reviews from these apps, users stated that the overall flow and user experience was not great as it was lacking features and had certain bugs.
Integrations
Most apps allow users to integrate other tools (Slack, Asana, Trello, etc.) to easily transfer data from one platform to the other.
Artificial Intelligence
Most apps had an artificial intelligence feature that allowed users to quickly record, transcribe, and summarize meetings while seamlessly integrating into the meeting workflow and favorite tools of the company.
Ideation and Low Fidelity Prototyping
To design a more effective virtual meeting experience, we sketched feature ideas grounded in user interviews, competitive analysis, Reddit research, and journey mapping. Our goal was to explore AI-powered features that enhance engagement, clarity, and productivity during meetings.
Each team member rapidly sketched concepts—like agendas, timers, transcripts, and collaboration tools—which we reviewed and prioritized in Miro. Our design decisions were guided by both primary and secondary research, including direct user feedback and industry best practices. These insights, combined with our user persona, helped shape features like meeting timers, action items, and smart agendas to address real user needs and behaviors.
We created low-fidelity wireframes to translate our sketches into a tangible layout of Convoke’s in-meeting features. Focused on structure over visuals, these screens helped us explore functionality, identify early usability issues, and ensure alignment with user needs before moving into higher fidelity.
Concept and Usability Testing
To evaluate the clarity and relevance of our design, we conducted four concept testing sessions with individuals who frequently attend virtual meetings. Using semi-structured interviews, we walked participants through task-based scenarios, sketches, personas, and user stories to gather feedback on our design’s strengths and weaknesses. Insights from these sessions led to key changes, including the addition of a Decision Tracker, a reorganized navigation system to reduce information overload, and the removal of meeting engagement analytics due to privacy concerns.
We followed up with usability testing to assess the practicality and flow of our prototype. Three professionals were guided through the final screens in the order they would be used during a typical meeting. Feedback focused on the intuitiveness of features like the transcript, agenda, and notes. Participants suggested improvements to the Decision Tracker labels, pointed out confusion around iconography, and highlighted the need for better space usage on the agenda screen to minimize visual clutter.
TAKEAWAYS
Add a Detailed Decision Tracker:
Suggested by stakeholders to capture key decisions during meetings and improve follow-through.
Reduce Information Overload:
Participants preferred a navigation bar to separate features rather than showing everything on one screen.
Remove Attendee Analytics:
Concerns around privacy and distractions led to removing engagement tracking from the design.
Refine Decision Tracker Labels:
Replace "Denied / Approved / In-progress" with "To-do / In-progress / Completed" to avoid negative connotations.
Clarify Export Icon:
Users were unsure what action the export icon would trigger—icon needs clearer labeling or redesign.
Simplify Agenda Screen Layout:
Time blocks for each agenda item took up too much space; participants suggested a more compact visualization.
Final Designs
Using the takeaways from our usability testing and concept tests, the team made the final iterations presented below. The following screens represent the in-meeting flow of Convoke. Convoke would integrate with existing video conferencing platforms and act as a side-bar for users throughout their meeting. Data and other information from the side bar would then be saved and displayed in the main Convoke platform.
Click the arrows to follow the prototype —
Reflection
Convoke was a project that enabled me to investigate the convergence of AI, productivity, and user experience in virtual meeting environments. Being my first experience collaborating with an industry client, the project pushed me to learn how to quickly adjust—how to balance user needs against stakeholder priorities while working through a real-world design process.
Coming into this experience studio, I had no experience with client-facing workflows, but through the experience I gained a good understanding of what it takes to move from research to implementation. I was involved in every step of the way—from interviewing and identifying user pain points to drawing out features, prototyping mid-fidelity wireframes, and refining our concept through cycles of feedback. The scope of the project made me reflect intensely on how each design decision supports achieving clarity, collaboration, and efficiency.
Most importantly, this project made me appreciate iteration. Watching our original ideas evolve through concept testing, usability sessions, and team critique showed me how flexible and adaptable good design is. It was a rewarding challenge that sharpened both my design thinking and skills at communicating ideas in a collaborative, client-oriented environment.
More Other cases
Convoke- DEFI Design
2024
UI/UX Design