Ecosystem of products to increase productivity

Smita Dessai
4 min readSep 17, 2021

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 Story

some of the brainstorming points

Our 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.

Our Chat 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 to next level

  • 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)

Extensible Solution

When there are products of same company available for all purposes then it can be integrated together to give a better experience.

For eg. Gmail can allow scheduling Google Meet, Outlook can allow Teams to schedule with context. This will simplify the process for users.

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!

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Smita Dessai

All the articles written by me are my thoughts of reimagining everything with creating useful products for the users and sharing my experiences in real world :)