Case Study: Intelligent Notes - Collaboration & Meetings
Principal Product Designer at Microsoft - OneNote, Outlook, Teams & Office
Several years ago Microsoft published a white paper on ‘The New Future Of Work’. The report is a combination of over 50 research studies carried out across Microsoft from the beginning of the pandemic.
“‘We believe it represents the largest compilation of research related to the pandemic’s impact on work practices available to date. The findings highlight a number of acute challenges and suggest opportunities to develop new work practices that are more efficient, equitable, and energizing. Work will never again be the same. With care and effort, however, we hope to make it better.’”
OneNote, Windows 10 & iOS Web. Integrated Meeting Notes alongside Notebooks.
Summary
When work environments shifted overnight from office to home locations, usage patterns and traffic volumes increased dramatically across all Microsoft products and services. Leading to an increased need for better collaboration tools.
Work on a modern collaborative toolset was already underway and several key components of a collaborative technology, later to be be released as ‘Loop’ had already been designed and implemented and were dogfooding internally as part of an overarching strategic plan. Entry points for ‘Loop’ components were established in a number of Microsoft products including Teams.
Components such as collaborative agendas, checklists, coauthoring paragraphs, tables, task lists and voting tables were easily accessible via Office, Search, OneDrive and Sharepoint as well as being embedded in Teams chats and Outlook across multiple endpoints. Changes made by users are synced across all end points no matter where it is.
I had been working on a project at OneNote looking at improving organisation and navigation when we pivoted to concentrate on something new.
Collaborative Meeting Notes is a continuation of the loop experience, designed to improve meetings, capture notes, tasks, meeting transcripts and more.
Additionally, the new Meeting Notes was going to replace a note taking app already in Teams that was going to be sunsetted as part of a major update to the Teams codebase.
My role
I was the Principal Designer responsible for collaborative notes, meetings and integrations experiences across Office, OneNote, Outlook & Teams ‘Collaboration and Meetings’. This case study covers a very small part of what was to become one of the most challenging, complicated and rewarding projects I have ever worked on, exasperated by the worst pandemic of a generation.
The OneNote team consisted of a number of product designers, researchers, engineers and product managers spread across several continents and time zones. However, it gets interesting when you have to collaborate with other teams across the company. The Meeting Notes feature was going to be available across the entire Microsoft ecosystem, Teams, Outlook, OneNote, Office, M365 and SharePoint.
Within each of those product teams there were individual teams responsible for various features and functionality, e.g. iOS or Web, or sharing functionality, or calling experiences. It took the whole org and a lot of effort to come together, organise and manage the work in a timely, structured (sometimes not so structured) manner.
It was organised, but complicated, and required a lot of communication to keep on top of the latest information, product releases and timescales. Fortunately I worked with some great product managers to help manage and prioritise the work load. The project was rapid, highly iterative and had a ‘in-progress’ nature about it. And involved collaborating with multiple teams and design organisations across Microsoft. Spread over multiple timezones in the US, UK, Germany and India.
Why collaborative Meeting Notes?
The pandemic meant that people were having more online meetings, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of notes, meeting outcomes, tasks, assignments and who said what when. It was difficult to take accountability and responsibility and conversations were getting lost.
We were in meetings all day, teachers and students were in video calls back to back for 6 hours straight! I’d never had so many meetings, and I didn’t remember having this many meetings when we worked together in an office.
Research showed that people were taking notes in all manner of places. On their phones, on paper, in apps like OneNote, Bear, Notion or Word. The problem was that they were personal notes, they couldn’t be shared, and if they were to be shared, they needed to be written up in an app that everyone had access to, but even then they often lacked context, date and time of the meeting, who was there, what were the outcomes and so on. They were also really difficult to recall, finding them in the future was going to be tricky.
Collaborative notes was created to help keep track of what had happened during a meeting. Creators could allow anyone via a permissioning model to view and edit Meeting Notes, prioritise tasks and create to do lists and planners.
The work
The mission was that for every Teams meeting you would automatically be able to take and share collaborative notes. From the initial meeting creation via Outlook or Teams, notes are available for team collaboration and co-authoring. Everyone invited can view and edit, add to the agenda and capture to dos all in one app, all synced and organised by OneNote.
Collaborative Meeting Notes touch every part of the office ecosystem. (See diagram below for entry points) They’re available anywhere anytime by anyone who has permission.
Collaborative Meeting Notes sitemap, showing Meeting Notes reach across Microsoft ecosystem.
The Meeting Note lifecycle
We found an effective way to communicate progress and user journeys to leadership and the rest of the org was to split them into three parts, ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’. Then by ‘organiser’ and ‘participants’ or ‘recipients’.
This allowed us to demonstrate and iterate on the complete end to end lifecycle of a meeting note across all devices and platforms.
Before
Create a event in Teams or Outlook
Set, and collaborate on an agenda
Everyone invited has access
Find notes automatically, organised in OneNote
During
Meeting note automagically available for everyone to contribute
Hundreds of participants can type notes while contributing or listening to the conversation or watching a presentation
Intelligence automatically identifies tasks as people are talking or taking notes
Intelligence can assign tasks to the relevant people
Key moments from the meeting transcripts are identified and can be inserted automatically
After
Meeting Notes can be recalled in OneNote, Teams, Outlook, Office and via search
Meeting recaps are sent automatically and if the meeting has been recorded the video and transcript are available shortly afterward
Meeting assets such as PowerPoint presentations or Word files are made available as part of the Meeting Note asset collection.
We need a Meeting Note(s) icon
This discussion went on for weeks, we needed an icon we could use for navigation to represent ‘Meeting Notes’. OneNote already had an app icon, a notebook icon, a section icon and a document icon.
We couldn’t use any of these as they were all app or document related. The icon needed to work with other icons already in product. It had to work across operating systems, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and web, and it had to work in what ever app Meeting Notes was going to appear in, i.e. Outlook, Teams, OneNote and Office. And, it couldn’t be an icon we used for anything else. It was only to be used to invoke the Meeting Notes feature within an app.
We had five contenders for the top place of Meeting Note icon, pictured below right.
After many rounds of testing, internal discussion and gathering user feedback we had a winner. A simple ‘note’ icon. That met our requirements and worked anywhere we needed to use it.
Icon alignment across endpoints.
Error handling
This was a fun part of the project as with error handling, we needed to remain professional and follow Microsoft design patterns, but also be mindful of the OneNote target audience and tone of voice. Some examples of the types of errors we needed to account for are displayed below.
Accessibility
Everything we design must be accessible and usable. Extensive care and attention was paid to ensure our new Meeting Notes feature was going to be inclusive, work with screen readers and allow users to navigate via the keyboard. We also designed for the varying colour blindness types and partially sighted conditions. The product is available in the many themes available across operating systems, light, dark mode, and high contrast modes.
Feedback mechanisms
As well as implementing telemetry across the experience to monitor usage, it was really import to ensure we allowed customers to provide feedback too while dogfooding the feature with employees internally and with real world customers on preview programs.
Microsoft has many mechanisms that allow customers to provide feedback however as our product was integrated with SharePoint we needed to utilise the existing user interface and patterns to gather customer suggestions, comments and questions. The data from this feedback form was used to iterate and improve the product as we continued to develop new features and functionality.
Challenges (a short list…)
Compatability
The Meeting Notes feature needed to work across a whole plethora of applications and services across the Microsoft ecosystem. To include, teams, Outlook, OneNote, Office, Mac, Windows, iOS and Android
Coherence
Maintaining multiple end point designs and flows is complicated and we needed to ensure we stayed on top of things. Presentation decks and screen designs were checked and double checked before releasing for review or development. Time consuming, but worth it for the craft.
Managing timezones
Teams are spread across the world at Microsoft, with people working on Meeting Notes based on the east and west coasts of the US, the United Kingdom, Germany and India. Managing timezones and being mindful of people’s hours meant that if we needed to have a meeting with everyone involved we had at most a 2 hour window to do so. Once the pandemic kicked in we found ourselves being sucked into endless meetings back to back, with no break in between to take a breath. Because of this we agreed to start and end meetings at 5 minutes past or before the hour to allow time to take a comfort break, or to make a drink in between calls.
Product reviews and updates
There were a lot of product reviews with all concerned parties within Microsoft. A lot of product teams and departments were involved with the Meeting Note project and it touched all areas of the business.
Moving goal posts
It can’t be helped sometimes, goal posts moved a few times throughout the duration of the project. Sometimes it can be hard to change tack in the middle of a flow, however I think myself and the team handled them professionally and with grace.
Org changes
Yep, them happened too. As business priorities change, so do organisation and team structures. In a large organisation like Microsoft we were used to it, it keeps us fresh, and ensures we’re working on what is good for the customer and the business.
Outlook vs Teams vs OneNote
Who’s in charge! Who’s driving the project, who’s accountable for the success of the overall experience. We all are.
Nomenclature
A lot of time was spent noodling over various wording, calls to action and instructional copy throughout the project lifecycle. Making sure all screens were up-to-date and consistent was a challenge.
Dogfooding all the time
The product didn’t always work!
Success 🥳
We were going to measure success as a retention percentage over a 6 month period and if anyone created or edited a Meeting Note it was going to be deemed a success. Watch those metrics!
What impact did the project have?
Meeting Notes were well received internally and after taking a quick look at some articles and product release announcements, a public preview was released in Jun 2023 and a lot of the feedback was about features and functionality that haven’t been released yet. Feedback however was mostly positive… watch this space…
Release announcement
Insider Blog
https://insider.microsoft365.com/it-it/blog/collaborative-meeting-notes-in-teams-meetings
Collaborative Meeting Notes in the wild
Microsoft released a video on YouTube showcasing some of the new features and functionality. Meeting Notes has a mention about 20 seconds in. Please do take a look, I think it looks pretty good.
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Product design leadership, strategy and mentoring. Find out more About me, drop me a message and send an email to keith@keithsymons.com or use this form to get in touch, I'll look forward to hearing from you. Many thanks.