Ecosystem of products to increase productivity
Let’s talk about ecosystem and how continuity in products can help our daily life.
Most of the corporate world uses Microsoft Outlook, Teams, Gmail Google Meet etc. We have to juggle between various calls, tasks, attend meetings, schedule meetings etc. Yes, AI has reduced our manual efforts to an great extent. Still as we use any product in various situations, we come across different angles of it and face new issues.
“Every pain point is not a way to think that existing product is not usable. Sometimes, we need upgrades or extend to new features which makes it more enriching”
An enhancement is what I am looking for in each Email App where it also has ability to schedule a meeting by learning the context of data.
User Scenario
What user says…
I always struggle when it comes to scheduling a meeting. There is always a group chat or email thread which is on-going and we have to schedule calls every now and then to get into some feature discussion or anything. If there is no alias created it is tough to add each group member. Some have similar names, tracking their ids is tough. It would be great if these apps could make scheduling simple.
Emails
We have lot of mail threads going on everyday and recipients in each of the threads are equally important. Whenever we want to schedule a meeting with people in existing thread, we have to switch to a different interface and create meeting by again entering all the recipient information.
Isn’t this a lot of work for users to do?
Why do you think we have not thought about learning user’s context in this space?
This scenario for that matter is applicable for all email apps be it Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or any others.
Chat / Teams Groups
We deal with multiple chat groups in our day to day lives at work. Various projects, products, features, discussions, fun activities or any other areas which we work upon at our jobs. We have the groups created, participants added however, there is no schedule option to go ahead and create meeting with the same audience.
The chat group may or may not have the call button however, it is very intuitive to have a reminder set which better applies to the theory of humans “Recognition vs Recall”.
Artificial Intelligence
The apps have matured so much that they give endless suggestions and make our lives easier. System understands our natural language, it understands patterns, it knows the humans using it to some extent.
AI is so buzzing in today’s world and it is immensely helpful to users.
Ideation
- How about having an option to schedule a meeting within the existing context like sending a meeting invite from a chat group already created or from a mail having 5+ or 10+ participants?
- We need option to send a mail from a group which is already created as a chat group.
- User will not have to again enter all participant names
- This will be quick and intuitive
- Will prevent errors in names
- No more searching mail ids/employee ids
- No more forgetting names
Just noodling (Mobile-First Approach)
- User should be able to carry forward the context while scheduling a existing meeting.
- Do not make users enter the whole team in the invite if it already exists in a mail or previous team invite. Even if the employee name is auto suggested, it can still reduce this time if context is taken smartly by the system itself.
- Schedule teams invite through a teams group chat, or email.
- Same feature incorporated in Outlook as well as Teams.
- It should work on both desktop and mobile app.
Other Use Cases
- If a product has only email app solution but does not have meeting apps then it could manage integrations with other available meeting apps like Zoom, Google Duo, Google Meet etc.
- According to this use case if user is accessing on laptop/desktop devices then it can have extended minified interface where user can schedule calls.
- If the mails track email ids outside of the domain then it should show alerts and help the organiser fix it and choose appropriate platform for calls.
I am sure you must have experienced the similar case in your daily work. Hoping that we will have this feature down the line. :)
Do share your thoughts :)
Happy Learning!
