Designing A Great Meeting Room Experience

This post is a thought experiment in designing a great meeting room experience. This post will not go into the productive ways to conduct meetings but will deal with the mundane yet essential logistics part of meetings.

We will try to design the experience based on a couple of simple, timeless principles:
1. Nudging people towards proper behavior – Libertarian Paternalism.
2. Not relying on one’s will power to do the right thing – Ulysses Contract.
3. Designing the environment to influence productive behavior.

Here we go; this is more of a listicle than structured prose.

If you want someone to do something, make it easy for them to do it – following this principle, it should be effortless to book a meeting room. The booking interface should list all the meeting rooms and the available free slots. It should also inform all the facilities a meeting room has like video conferencing, the capacity of the room, etc.

Outside every meeting room, there should be a display of the schedule for the day.

One of the often irritations is you landing up for a meeting in a room that you booked well in advance to find a paper sticking on the door saying the room is blocked for some critical visitor; this sort of overriding should be restricted to only a very few rooms.

How many times has it happened to you that you get up during a meeting to write something on the whiteboard to find the marker and the duster missing? A meeting room should be well-stocked with stationaries so that people do not have to step out in the middle of a meeting to fetch them.

There should be a large wall clock in every meeting room so that everyone is conscious of time. Even better would be a countdown timer which gives an auditory signal when the end of the meeting is near.

There should be a designated place in all meeting rooms to dump phones and laptops. One of the biggest distractions during a meeting is the constant barrage of notifications on devices and the pavlovian reaction to them. Do not rely on people controlling their will power to overcome this but design the right environment for people to achieve this.

Even though meetings have come to be associated with unproductivity, I believe collaboration and brainstorming are essential for crafting the right product. It is paramount that you do everything possible to facilitate communication and discussion between teams; this might make or break your product.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash