Amazon Meetings
How might we make meeting creation simpler for an overbooked and complex organization?
Amazon Meetings is an internal tool that allows Amazon employees to schedule meetings in an environment with busy, often overlapping schedules and overcrowded rooms. Amazon aimed to become less reliant on Outlook and wanted to create a replacement that was geared towards the specific needs of their workplace.
As the primary IC, I worked closely with the Creative Director. We synced with the PM and engineering team from Amazon every week.
Deliverables
UX / UI design
UX audit
Design system audit
ARIA guidelines
Team
Creative Director
Product Designer / me
Product Manager
Engineers
Timeline
1 month (2020)
As we were conducting research and auditing the interface, it quickly became clear that the current UI was falling short in many respects.
What they liked
The original UI allowed users the core function of creating a meeting based on room suggestions.
What they didn't like
However, users rated the UX below-par for the lack of easy-to-use controls and ability to personalize their experience so that they’d get more accurate and helpful suggestions.
User Problem
Users struggled to book rooms and organize meetings at Amazon, where offices were often overcrowded and people were double-booked for meetings.
Understanding Users
We talked to around eight employees at Amazon who would be the heaviest users of this tool⎯ program managers, executive assistants, and managers. (Because this was happening during the pandemic, we conducted interviews and focus group sessions remotely.) We learned that:
Many of them were skeptical of meeting suggestion tools because they often had to make educated guesses on what meetings to prioritize based on intuition and knowledge of their team’s priorities.
They created meetings with high urgency, but still desired the flexibility to create more complex meetings (meetings requiring a higher number of attendees, room features, specific types of rooms, etc.) when they needed it.
User Insights
Users relied on their learned intuition about attendees' needs and priorities to book meetings, so they desired tools that allowed them more control and flexibility.
Users requested the ability to create quick, straightforward meetings as well as more complex ones.
Ideation
Eventually, we wanted to create a comprehensive meeting creation tool with familiar views and multiple layouts. However, we wanted to begin by designing the "core" experience that would solve the key user problems we've discovered. We began to researching interaction models and deciding which elements suited our users' needs the most.
We decided to take elements from the Resource Surfer, because showing more meeting detail would allow users to quickly view the status of meetings, rooms, and people, which would be conducive to faster and more accurate meeting creation.
We also explored a model called the Meeting Maker, where users can “quick-create” a meeting. This may not allow the users a lot of customizability at the start but we can give them this capability later and provide a more complex meeting creation feature alongside the quick meeting creation to accommodate a wide variety of needs.
We used elements from the other design directions when we felt that it would help simplify complex meeting creation as we refined these models, eventually creating the Stepper and Zoomer. For example, the Stepper and Zoomer are Wizard-lite in that they walk users through the steps while still making it easy for them to jump between the different steps. This would also allow users to view and search for rooms and people with more robust filtering.
Design Decisions
We chose a "Wizard-lite" interaction model to simplify the process of providing various types of inputs for complex meeting creation. We decided to pair this with a simple meeting creation tool that would allow users to see room suggestions with only a few optional inputs.
Design system
We began integrating Amazon Meeting's design system and collaborated weekly with their team to refine the visual design.
Final Design
Complex meeting creation
We designed an interface that suggests available time slots and rooms for all of the attendees, rank-sorting them by desirability based on proximity of the rooms and priority level / optionality of some attendees.
The user begins by adding attendees and a room that they're interested in booking, if they have one.
Then they see date/time and room suggestions. They can adjust the inputs for better suggestions.
Control
For more control, users can also view and adjust these suggestions on a timeline that places each suggestion side-by-side with attendees' individual schedules.
Quick room booking
To book a room quickly, the user can also choose "Find a room" on the homepage, quickly add the building and dates they need a room for, and find an available room. Typically, users are booking a room on the fly so we removed additional input fields, and set the start day/time to current day/time by default.
Result
The final design was praised by the Amazon team. Peter Skillman, the UX manager, said that it was easily one of the best designed internal tools at Amazon. Another UX manager told us that it created a new bar for the quality of UX of all MeetEx products. After the launch, the team reached out to let us know that it received positive feedback from users, as well as a 9% uptick in adoption.
Conclusion
While the redesign was successful, if I had more time I would explore ways to reduce the number and the appearance of identical-looking input fields, which is overwhelming at first glance. We might do this through the use of groupings and progressive disclosure.
I would also explore the onboarding process more, as the first thing users are forced to do when they try to create a meeting is discern whether they need to create a “simple” meeting, “standard meeting,” or a “room invite.” The differences should be made clearer at the outset.
This was the first time I worked on a product for users at this scale and completely remotely. We moved quickly while relying heavily on stakeholder focus groups for direction and supplemented this with casual test sessions with personal acquaintances who worked at Amazon. This taught me to roll with the punches and try to get feedback however I could.