Problem
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work was on the rise. Despite this, few tools were tailored to the remote worker’s experience. As a remote worker, you could not see the comings and goings of people, who was speaking with whom, what meetings were happening. You missed out on serendipitous conversations, and were often informed of key decisions being made without context.
My work on Loop Team aimed to change all of this—by designing a product to make distributed teams feel more connected to both what is happening right now and what happened in the past.
Early Ideation
Loop Team was not focused on the remote worker experience at the outset. Our original goal was to build a product that automatically generated meeting notes. To do this, we needed a way to categorize meetings while also reducing the hassle of constantly generating new meeting URLs, so we introduced a channel system (Rooms) similar to Slack and Slite.
Unfortunately, our users found the automatically generated notes to be lackluster. However, remote workers in our alpha testing group found delight in seeing who was meeting in which room and when. While we wouldn’t drop the AI aspect of the app, we shifted our focus towards developing an ideal experience for distributed teams.
Major Product Iterations
From note taking to virtual office
Early high level wireframe of our initial vision of Loop Team (the product was formerly called 'Lentil'). Note at this time the product had not taken on a focus on people at all--it was purely a hub for AI generated meeting notes.
A more formalized early wireframe, where channels were introduced to categorize meetings. Here we had high level meeting minutes that mapped directly to recorded meeting audio, as well as transcript in the fourth column. However, issues regarding the quality of the meeting notes and transcript negatively impacted the usefulness of this UI.
In this version you can start to see the increased focus on user status. We realized around this time that the app was at a bit of a crossroads--the sidebar navigation was proving to be very delightful to our users but the notes side was still struggling and was too complex.
We started building content previously featured exclusively in the notes column into the sidebar navigation. Notes and transcript were deprioritized and the need to have deep drill downs into individual rooms was becoming unnecessary as a result.
A reimagined Loop Team. The left column was made more vibrant and attractive as it was playing a more central role in the product. The right hand column became purely high level summary information of all meetings in the org and largely removed meeting transcripts.
Creating the Digital Office
Loop Team’s core features
Real-time awareness
In a physical office, you see coworkers stand up to go to a meeting room—and depending on who is meeting with whom, you may infer what they are discussing. If they are speaking in the open you may decide to join in. You are an active participant and you are in the know.
We sought to deliver real-time awareness by allowing users to literally see the conversations happening in their digital workplace. You can see Jag, Mauro, and Vasish in the Engineering room, as well as keywords and screenshots from their live screen share. You can also see that I am having a 1:1 chat with Raj. This mimics the type of activity you would see happening in a physical office while also keeping conversations high level to respect privacy.
Real-time context
In a physical office, you can tell who is focused and busy. You can hear if they are furiously typing an email or if they are idly thinking something through. You are able to determine whether you are going to interrupt them, or not.
To provide context, I designed and we implemented a concept of “activity presence.” Activity presence was an enhanced version of online status—it communicated not only if a user was busy, but also what they were doing if they were online. We kept things very high level—never revealing the app’s name, and only assigning statuses based on popular productivity apps. We specifically did not want this to be used to police employees.
If a user stayed in an app long enough, they would enter into a ‘focused’ status to communicate to others that they may be in flow.
You could also see what the local time was for a user so you would know if they are close to wrapping up their day.
Real-time people access
In a physical office you don’t have to request an invite to start chatting. You can drop into conversations immediately.
Speed was very important to us. We sought to reduce burden wherever we could to get a conversation started. You could start a conversation with someone at any time (although the other party would have to unmute/turn on video to respond). We achieved fast connection times of 1-2 seconds. We introduced keyboard shortcuts for advanced users to start conversations with others without having to use the mouse at all.
We did not change too much of the actual conferencing experience, however we did create a minimalistic UI that could optionally be always on top of all your windows. We accepted that users will often multi-task in meetings but always having the other meeting participants visible kept users engaged and focused on the conversation.
Try the prototype!
Other Design Explorations
Loop Team iOS Mobile Lobby - I designed both iOS and Android apps for Loop Team. Most of our innovation was focused on our desktop app experience because most of our users were joining meetings from a computer.
Unimplemented concepts due to time or app focus - 1. Snapshots would be taken of each participant in a meeting to let you see your teammates every day. 2. Deep integration into other tools that could show what events happened during that meeting (sprint starts, etc). 3. Creating 'Loops' which were essentially tasks generated from our AI's action items.
In Zoom, screen sharing bombards the user with a barrage of screenshots, none of which are often easy to interpret. I tried to simplify the screen sharing flow by focusing more on the app the user wanted to share instead of overly relying on images.
Switching between different apps while screen sharing is often painful. You usually have to stop and start screen sharing all over again. I designed a concept where a user could just switch their current screen share quickly and easily.
Results and Reflection
Left: Loop Team public beta available today
Unfortunately, I was laid off due to the Covid-19 pandemic and was no longer an employee when Loop Team’s public beta shipped. However, much of my design work and thinking feature prominently in the final product. One of the most significant changes was the removal of transcript and much of the AI learnings which had not provided the accuracy we had originally hoped for.
As you can see, the product now focuses primarily on your coworkers with rooms playing a secondary role. I believe this is the natural evolution of the shift towards distributed teams and away from note taking, as rooms were a categorization method for notes. Had the product started with a focus on distributed teams vs. note taking, we may not have created the concept of rooms in the first place.
The AI has, however, definitely provided Loop Team with a differentiating factor. Much of what we had built for the transcription and action item AI has been repurposed to provide the product with deeper insight into user’s activities.