Where better meetings happen

Transforming rooms

Role: led early product redesign, implemented and maintained the layout engine

The main design goal of the rebuild was to create a responsive room layout capable of scaling to hundreds of participants. Through internal prototypes and discussions, I helped establish a vision for a layout engine that preserved what made the product special with a lot of added flexibility.

The concept was to provide digital spaces that transform to meet your needs. The layout prioritize screen space based on what was most important in a meeting context—whether it be a 1:1, a squad or townhall meeting. It included a rule-based system that dynamically adjusts layouts, ensuring seamless transitions as meetings evolved.

Recognizing room layout and mechanics as fundamental to the product, I took ownership of its implementation and maintenance.

This was the state of the product mid 2021. Visual design credits to Jordan Amblin and the team at Heydays.

Directing attention

Role: concept, early design, contributed to implementation

Most video meeting software mimics small groups around a conference table, but scaling up digitally doesn't mirror real-life practices.

I suggested using physical meeting layouts as inspiration, employing a stage to distinguish presenters from the audience. By establishing a visual hierarachy and positioning attendees in smaller tiles below the stage, we aimed to alleviate the pressure of constant visibility. Placing everyone with active cameras in the front row fostered a supportive atmosphere for presenters. This adjustment led to a significant rise in video-on participation and improved large meeting dynamics.

Solving the big meeting participation problem

Role: concept, early design, implementation

Big meetings have a big participation problem. Isolated chat interfaces are a distraction at best.

Drawing from my positive experience, I proposed that larger townhall meetings could adopt a Turntable.fm room-like atmosphere. By integrating inline chat and quick emoji reactions over the video grid we encouraged active audience participation without interruptions. Connecting the reaction to the person that sent it is done through playful tile bounce animations that animate into view even if the tile is below the fold. We witnessed firsthand how this feature transformed our culture, bringing the room to life in a memorable way.

Breakout Rooms Groups

Role: concept, early design

Another effective method to solve the big meeting participation problem is to temporarily turn a big meeting into many small meetings. Existing solutions were universally hated, causing confusion as participants were abruptly moved between meetings without clear visual cues.

The proposed solution was to leverage our adaptable room layouts to maintain continuity within the same meeting. It empowered users to freely move in and out of groups, enhancing agency and ensuring a seamless experience. As it's often still desirable to assign people to as specific group we leveraged presence as indirect communication - holding space for where people needed to be instead of forcing them to go there.

Visual design credits to Jordan Amblin.

Picture-in-Picture

Role: concept, design, implementation

During a company hackathon, I proposed using the Picture-in-Picture browser API to solve the problem of context loss during screen sharing.

Despite initial raised concerns about computational overhead of the "hack" due to the need to composite multiple video streams into one, I proceeded with the idea and found no measurable performance loss in practice.

I later ported reactions into the composite video exposing even more context from the room and it quickly became one of the most used and beloved features in the product.