In these times of social distancing, may it be for personal or professional matters, we all have been using more videoconference tools. The one I personally use for calls with friends or my mentoring sessions is Google Meet. The tool has a minimalist user interface and is pretty simple to use but there is something I find frustrating every time I use it.
What is the frustration about?
My mentoring sessions are focused around my mentees and I talking about life, work, where they are, where they want to be and how we can work together to get them to that place. Most of what we do is talk and share our screens but like any other meeting, we share some links and resources.
By the time we reach the end of the meeting, we may have shared 10-20 links. Unfortunately, there is no way to save or export those links. If we both hang up we will lose everything we shared in the chat during the meeting.
What can make this frustration go away?
As the organizer of a Meet call I would like to be able to save or export everything that has been said in the chat so I can :
- Take a look at it later and act on it
- Share it with other invited participants who didn't make it
- Give the ability to invited to do whatever they want with it
How can it be done?
Options
A] We might automatically create a folder named "Notes" in the meeting organizer's Google Drive where every meeting notes would be automatically saved and sharable.
B] We might design a feature that allows the organizer to send the chat to participants by e-mail
- When the organizer tries to leave the meeting we might automatically ask them if they want to export the chat before leaving.
- Since we can make the difference between a sentence and a link (presence of "www.", ".com", "https://" , ...), then we could let the organizer choose to export discussion only, links only, or both.
- If the organizer doesn't show up for the meeting, the right to send the chat or meeting notes can be automatically granted to the first person on the invite list.
- If the organizer has this habit of forgetting stuff, they can set the option to grant rights to guests.
MVP
For someone who has a lot of meeting and doesn't care about saving the notes of certain meetings, option A might be overwhelming. Furthermore, before automating a feature, maybe we should assess how used it is.
Therefore, for the MVP let's focus on simply giving the ability to the Organizer to export the whole chat or meeting notes and send them to participants via e-mail.
What it might look like
Since there is already an action existing, my proposal is to add a "Send meeting notes" button to the bottom bar just near other actions such as "Share screen" or "Enable subtitles".
On click, that button would open a pop-in where the organizer would be able to select or deselect the people he/she wants to send the meeting notes too. The organizer can add people who wasn't in the base invite list as well.
Global learnings - Takeaways
We may think that the experience of videoconference tools stops when we hit the "hang up" button, but we just need to take a look at human behavior in real meetings to see that it doesn't quite. In real life, at the start of a meeting (or even before sometimes), there's often someone chosen to send the takeaways to participants (present or not) via e-mail after the meeting.
Oftentimes, to create a better experience, we need to ask ourselves what happens just before and after users engage with our product. By knowing so, we would be more aware of their needs, discover improvement points or new business opportunities.
What do you think about this solution? Would it be helpful to you? Would you have done anything differently?
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