Meeting Reformer

June 13, 2018

Amy Storrow, a Foreign Service Officer and Una Chapman Cox Fellow, came to Dijidl North with a challenge to present her research completed during her fellowship in an approachable format for both new and experienced government employees. Amy’s research focused on offering alternatives for standard meeting formats, as well as understanding why meetings have become inefficient and ineffective for the people who attend them and the people who run them.  

She wanted to design a format that would allow different users to find the information they needed and had built the beginnings of a game in the Choose Your Own Adventure style.  It was visually boring, though, and she knew it would be a better product with a more collaborative approach. She had also created a Meeting Ecosystem Inventory so that users could evaluate their own meetings against each other and derive their own best practices and problem spots. 

The Meeting Inventory form would need to be available for in print and digitally to domestic and international audiences, so accessibility for printing and digital storage of the form was critical. Our work on the “Create Your Own Adventure” game was to ensure that it was user-friendly and fun, but still informative of her research.

Our work began with the Meeting Inventory form. We worked with Amy to make sure the content of the form was succinct and could be formatted to multitude of sizes. We designed the form to be printed on A3, A4, Letter, and Tabloid size, conforming to both international and U.S. printing standards. When considering the design, we also utilized light colors for background colors and black for the text, so that black and white printers in federal offices and embassies would still allow the form to be legible. Also knowing that some users would be virtual when accessing it, we created a digital format that could be filled out using Adobe Reader and Acrobat programs, as well as Windows and Mac PDF reading software. Once the design was completed, we sent the form to Amy to have her sent it to several potential users to ensure that it was compatible on all computers and we printed the form on different computers to ensure that it was legible with varying printer qualities.

Google Forms was the best choice to build the Choose Your Own Adventure style game because of its availability at embassies and ability to collect user answers for Amy’s research. The game was named “Trailblazers: Meetings Galore!” to evoke its fun, light-hearted nature and capture an outdoor adventure theme. Through discussions and brainstorming sessions with Amy, the form was built out into four trails, each with its own trail name: Frontier Highlands, Main Street, Easy Peasy Lane, and Sprightly Avenue. With Amy, we mapped out the entire user work-flow from end-to-end, to make sure the game was clear and user-friendly. Before we began the visual design, the game was tested on potential users to collect suggestions and address points of confusion. 

After receiving feedback, we made updates to the game and added a Truth or Dare section to each trail to make it more interactive--to move the user from simply reading about meetings to taking action.  Amy also used it as a way to receive feedback on the game content and collect user information. Once the user experience was fleshed out, we applied visual design to the game to help guide users through the trails and apply the fun and light-hearted vision to the look and feel. We created custom illustrations to represent each “trailhead” and designed progress indicators to guide users. Wordmarks--logos created only from text/words--were also created for the game as well as the Truth or Dare sections. With the illustrations and colors applied, the Google Form began to look like a game. This aspect was extremely important because initially users did not think that talking about meetings or analyzing meetings could be fun, so we made sure that Amy’s vision of an “adventure” was realized.

After several rounds of revisions after receiving additional user feedback and testing with our team, we completed a beta version of the game. and it was sent out to a pilot users. By utilizing user centered design through the design process (from brainstorming to visual design), the final product is accessible internationally and domestically, but also reflected the user feedback to ensure a seamless user experience. Most importantly though, the game allowed Amy a way to make meeting reform approachable and fun.  Watch for the next version soon!

Check out the Trailblazers game and the Meeting Inventory form