Meeting room experience - Contextual observation
How might we better understand the experience of booking and using meeting rooms
(in the office) from the perspective of our colleagues.
Background
Two of the largest businesses units within the organisation believe that meeting room usage and booking experiences could be improved for colleagues. Previous work has been done to explore the technical side of meeting room experiences, but very little insight has been uncovered into how this affects internal colleagues.
The project sponsors believe that colleagues who experience problems don’t know where to go for help. So in turn, do not report any technical issues they may occur.
Role
User Researcher, supporting our Senior User Researcher with organising and facilitating ethnographic research within the workplace.
Research statement
As part of our research approach in exploring the meeting room experience from the perspective of colleagues, we conducted a contextual observation - observing how colleagues use meeting rooms in the office, over the period of a day.
To minimise any affects of us as researcher being present in the meeting room and the potential for people to act differently, we used passive observation to only observe the tasks and environment (also not interrupting colleagues when in the meeting room). All clarification questions were asked at the end of study.
What we set out to cover
Usage
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How do colleagues use the rooms?
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Are colleagues able to complete the task they booked the meeting for ?
Pain points
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What do colleagues do when they face technical issues when using a meeting room?
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What could be preventing the successful use of a meeting room?
Booking
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What are colleagues expectations when booking a meeting room?
Methodology
1. Existing data sources - Reviewing current data about what bookings are made using internal software's and insights from the Concierge teams in different office locations. With the end goal of obtaining quant data to help us understand
- Which rooms are being booked most often?
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​​Which rooms are being booked least often?
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How does usage differ by days of the week?
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Most frequent room bookers?
2. Internal Surveys - To capture the feedback and insights from colleagues who had recently booked meeting rooms on specific floors across two office locations. With an incentivised response of a £50 amazon gift card, saw over 400 completed surveys with a pool of willing participants for future research.
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3. Contextual observation of colleagues using meeting rooms - Conducting observation sessions to gain insights into the behaviour of colleagues when using meeting rooms.
Things look out for:
- Lighting conditions
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​Ergonomics
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Content of the room
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Signs of failure or friction
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Jobs to be done
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Emotions
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Behaviours
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Conversational points
4. Follow up interviews - Organising follow up interviews for the Senior researcher to conduct with lead room bookers to obtain qualitative insights into the overall experience of booking and using the meeting room for that day.
Example follow up questions:
- What was the reason for starting the meeting late?
- How was the temperature in the room?
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How comfortable was it for you to look at the big tv screen for the duration of the meeting (and from where you were sat)?
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What type of meeting was it ?
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What was the goal of the meeting ?
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How did you resolve the technology issues you faced at the beginning of the call?
Analysis
Typically broken down into stages to reduce the risk of cognitive overload.
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1. Thematic analysis
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Familiarisation - fully immersed in the data, reviewing several times, revisiting, both quantitative and & qualitative outputs
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Coding - breaking down the information found into a series of codes
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Code refinement - codes then grouped by commonality
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Theme creation - groups of codes then organised into overall themes
2. Affinity mapping - using collaboration software (Miro) & involving the discovery team
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3. Persona development - profiles were created to represent the behaviours, challenges and needs of colleagues using the meeting rooms.
Outputs
After a number of weeks, the final research outputs were collated into a slide deck and then presented to the business sponsors.
High level opportunities
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Unify and simplify the meeting room booking process
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Foster a shared sense of responsibility among colleagues for reporting issues
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Raise awareness about methods for recovering from technical issues
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Simplify and standardise the issue tracking for Concierge teams
Impact
For me personally this was an incredible opportunity to support Senior Researchers in the business with this ethnographic study. I have been able to see first hand the level of impact that booking and using meeting rooms in offices has on our colleagues. This study has allowed for recommendations to be delivered to project sponsors on how best to combat the barriers to success.