Kagenda: What if meetings could be smarter?

As a workplace consultant, hybrid setup has become an increasing requirement post pandemic. How will you create productive and meaningful solutions for new tenants? How will you trigger sustainable behaviour throughout the tenant's journey?

About the Project

This coursework project, Sustainable Design Framework, led by A/P Patrick Chia, was in collaboration with Keppel Land and we were paired with our business mentor, Donn Koh, from the Sustainable Urban Renewal (SUR) business unit.

Year

2023

Platform

Figma, Miro

Timeframe

13 weeks

Team

Celeste Seah, Y4 ID
Suzie Kwan, Y3 ID
Clement Koh, Y2 ID

What I did

Research plan
Workshop facilitation
Stakeholder management
Prototyping (lo-fi to hi-fi)
User interface design
Usability testing

Results

Conducted design research involving 19 participants using a variety of tools and methods
Scoped down the brief and formulated a hypothesis to design and test
Prototyped high-fidelity user interfaces for usability testing and stakeholder validation

Context

Keppel's real estate division (formerly known as Keppel Land) prides itself as an urban space solutions provider that leverages technology to deliver sustainable and customer-centric solutions that enrich people and communities. One part of its business is in renting out office spaces to corporates in their buildings including Keppel Bay Tower as well as smaller outfits and startups through their co-working business, KLOUD.

As a workplace consultant, hybrid setup has become an increasing requirement post pandemic.
How will you create productive and meaningful solutions for new tenants?
How will you trigger sustainable behaviour throughout the tenant's journey?

Adopting a user-centric approach while remaining cognizant of business needs, we strived to boost productivity and tenant companies' employee wellbeing (Social) under the Environmental Social Governance (ESG) framework.

TL;DR

This 4-minute video condenses our design process from research to the final solution. Read on for more details or skip to end for a product showcase video.

Over 13 weeks, we explored how knowledge workers today are navigating the contemporary work landscape post-pandemic. With hybrid modes becoming the norm in many corporations, we sought to understand the tensions between collaboration and productivity for the purpose of employee wellbeing, committed to the sustainable development of human capital.

Through the initial phase of our research, we engaged in four key interviews, utilising a range of tools including a ‘day-in-the-life at work/home’ map, card sorting and journal logs.

Our overarching goal was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted challenges inherent in this dynamic and evolving work paradigm. These varied methodologies allowed us to explore different dimensions, ensuring a holistic approach to our research development.

Interviews

Interviews Round #1: Do you prefer WFH or WFO?

We sat down with 5 interviewees one-on-one to gather their opinions on Work-from-Home vs Work-from-Office arrangements, using Day-in-a-Life journey maps as a tool to understand how their days might differ when WFH vs WFO and how they feel about it, enabling a comparison of the respective highs and lows.

All interviewees prefer office work but support a hybrid setup with remote work options.
80% (4 out of 5) value social interaction with colleagues as a primary reason for preferring office work.
60% (3 out of 5) find it challenging to end face-to-face meetings, leading to prolonged discussions.

Interviews Round #2: How does workplace culture affect employees’ wellbeing and productivity?

Through a card sorting activity, interviewees ranked workplace cultures. Follow-up questions provided insights into specific aspects of workplace culture and its impact on employees.

All interviewees referenced how the boss or upper management sets the tone for the work habits which forms a big part of the workplace culture.

Interview Round #3: How does upper management impact your productivity at work?

Building on the previous insight that upper management plays a significant role in employees’ lives, this round of interviews aimed to uncover overlooked implications and nuances.

Unanimously, all interviewees emphasise the decisive role of bosses/senior management in having the ultimate say.
2 out of 3 interviewees agree that the boss-employee dynamic emerges as a barrier, hindering employees from voicing concerns about extended meetings.

Interview Round #4: What are the type of meetings you have at Keppel and how are they like?

To understand the larger issue beyond symptoms, we examined meetings holistically, aiming to reveal underlying problems, including the impact of upper management.

All interviewees express concerns about low meeting retention and note that information exchange lacks organic flow, causing unnecessary setbacks.
The productivity of a meeting is heavily dependent on the clarity of the driver and the effectiveness of their agenda.

Overall research findings

To address the problem of inefficient meetings, we targeted issues such as meeting overruns, lengthy discussions, and tardiness. Yet, we discovered that these were symptoms of a larger problem: a lack of shared understanding among project members. The core issue lies in the fact that individuals aren’t aligned with the project’s objectives. Consequently, we continually need to bring everyone up to speed, resulting in significant time wastage.

Desktop research

Employees are more interested in utilizing AI to alleviate their work burdens than they are concerned about AI replacing their jobs. While some express worry about job displacement by AI (49%), an even larger percentage (70%) would eagerly delegate tasks to AI in order to reduce their workloads.

“It’s fascinating that people are more excited about AI rescuing them from burnout than they are worried about it eliminating their jobs.”
—Adam Grant, author and organizational psychology professor

AI has become increasingly integrated into the workforce, with various software applications leveraging AI as a valuable tool to enhance work processes. In the context of meeting management, several popular use cases of AI have emerged:

Benchmarking

We took a closer look at the current solutions available on the market and realised that none of them covered the full meeting journey from preparing an agenda to during the meeting itself to following up on action items afterwards.

AI filtering
Instant meeting recaps

Meeting summarisation
Extract quotes to share with colleagues
Time stamped notes

Real-time transcription

Our overarching goal was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted challenges inherent in this dynamic and evolving work paradigm. These varied methodologies allowed us to explore different dimensions, ensuring a holistic approach to our research development.

Co-design workshop

A co-design workshop was conducted with 8 Keppel staff to understand what areas are lacking in meetings and if AI has a bigger role to play in it.

To first get a sense of what they thought of AI in meetings, we gave the participants the features AI could perform in meetings from earlier and polled them on which they thought would be useful for them.

Participants were then each assigned roles according to the DACI framework and roleplayed in a meeting, curating the features they would like to see in each phase of the meeting journey using a paper "computer screen" through arranging feature cards.

These were the phases of the meeting we roleplayed with the participants.

Driver decides to call for a meeting, everyone else receives a meeting invite.
The meeting has started. Someone is presenting.
The meeting is ongoing. Everyone is brainstorming.
The meeting has ended and you are back at your desk

We analysed the top features for each of the 3 main meeting phases – before, during and after. We believe that this is because people have different goals at different stages of the meeting process.

Based on the count of the overall responses, the most popular features were as follows:

Features

With our insights, we designed Kagenda to be more than a meeting tool. It helps you manage projects using meetings as a base unit for progress. As such, it covers the full meeting user journey from setting up the agenda all the way to setting up the next meeting.

The UI designs were designed with input from the "paper screens" in the co-design workshop, taking into consideration screen real estate is scarce and users want to focus on the content being shared in the meeting, such as slide decks, over than the summary of the meeting.

Pre-meeting page

Get updated on your next meeting’s agenda, check if you missed out on any task or do some required read on the relevant materials.

Live meeting page

Kagenda transcribes, assigns tasks, summarises the discussion and even adds to it in real time while the meeting is ongoing.

Post meeting page

Recap on what has been discussed in the meeting you have just attended. Share discussion with your colleagues.

Usability testing

To assess how users might interact with Kagenda and what benefit it brings to them, Wizard-of-Oz user testing was conducted with 3 groups of participants while 2 other groups served as control groups and were not exposed to Kagenda during a similarly structured session. Each group had 3 users engaged in a meeting scenario to discuss a fictitious agenda for 15 minutes, with one of them playing the role of a driver and the other two being contributors.

This was simulated with two “wizards” summarizing the meeting behind the scenes with the summary UI updating live on participants’ computer screens.

The results showed that Kagenda helps meetings move at a faster pace by staying on track with the agenda and summary at hand. While the information retention was lower in the experimental groups, this may be due to Kagenda acting as a “second brain” and offloading the mental load of remembering information from meeting participants so they can focus on the contents of the meeting instead.

Product video

Improvements

Towards the end of the project, we did receive some feedback on how Kagenda could be better:

More active facilitation
Need to balance focus between meeting content and facilitation by Kagenda
Can incorporate more AI in a dialogue manner to perform more complex tasks e.g. writing agendas, as a brainstorming tool during discussions

Business

From Keppel's perspective as a workplace provider, we recommend dogfooding Kagenda with Keppelites before providing the service for Keppel’s tenants as an add-on digital service to the physical office space, though the product fit to Keppel's portfolio may have to further considered given Kagenda is a software-first solution.

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