Intro
Seismic Meetings is in Beta and looking to gain market share.
Seismic Meetings was a new feature in beta at Seismic, a sales enablement company. Seismic Meetings allows sales orgs to review digital meeting recordings and explore related AI-generated insights.
Opportunity
Customers are turning to competitors to share highlights from meeting recordings.
Discovery interviews
During customer interviews with beta customers of Seismic Meetings customers told us they were using external tools to share highlights from meeting recordings.
Competitive analysis
Evaluation of top conversational intelligence, sales enablement, and video editing tools was done. Some prominent names include Gong, Zoom, and Chorus. Features, UI patterns, and prominence were all evaluated.
Competitors all offer clip creation; primarily through 3 ui patterns: inline mode, dedicated modal, and highlighting the transcript.
Object-Oriented UX
Utilizing the OOUX framework we identified and came to agreement on the composition of clips in terms of core content, metadata, and interactions. We also came to an agreement regarding which elements we would include in the scope of the initial delivery.
I find that OOUX is a stellar way to quickly explore, identify, and scope out the core objects from a user experience.
Relationship mapping
Because Seismic is a large feature rich platform, we needed to map out how clips would live and interact with other environments and objects.
Both meeting recordings and their associated clips had to be considered in relationship to other content management and sharing features.
These activities provided alignment on the scope of clips cross-functionally as well as brought to light a number of important technical constraints such as Seismic acquiring a new video hosting service Vimeo.
Wire-framing
In creating initial wire-frames I chose to pursue the modal ui pattern primarily because it afforded us the ability to reuse the component across the diverse feature set of Seismic. Once finished, wireframes were shared with product, development, and design stakeholders for feedback.
Feedback
- The meeting transcript is too useful for video navigation to exclude from clip creation.
- The team was unsure where to put saved clips. Both technical constraint and business objectives required further definition.
Initial designs
As we reviewed customer's struggles with modals in our initial interviews and considered the importance of existing functionality on the meeting recording page, we came to the conclusion that clip creation would be more powerful and intuitive if done in-line instead of in a modal. The improvements in usability would be worth the costs in modularity when clips would be brought to other parts of the Seismic product.
After sharing these designs with stakeholders we got sign off to conduct usability testing.
Feedback
- Video thumbnails in the scrubber will not be technically feasible in first release.
Usability tests & interviews
6
Participants from 2 role types
6
1 hour sessions
18
Usability tasks
25
Contextual questions
95%
Task completion rate
83
System usability score
Findings
Chorus users were happy with inline clip creation.
Task completion was excellent and SUS score was good.
Participants failed to navigate saved clips in the designed focus mode.
Participants struggled to identify video playback from clip scrubber.
Participants expressed interest in a few more playback controls like “play from start”.
Improvements to be made
- Design a simpler pattern for navigating and viewing saved clips.
- Add a few playback control enhancements, ui labels, and tooltips to guide interactions.
Final solution
Changed saved clips from showing inline as a mode to a distinct and dedicated clip subpage.
Added a “play from start” button to the start input field.
Added tooltips for the quick set buttons for setting clip start and end.
Added labels to the clip trimmer for start, current, end, and duration.
Added clearer start and end labels to the transcript.
Moved the video scrubber out of the clip creation widget and added a time scrubber control to the clip trimmer control.
Things I wanted to pursue further…
- Video thumbnails in the clip trimmer
- Transcript highlighting at the word level of granularity (technically not feasible at the time)
- Pre-generating clip suggestions based on speaker topic, content shared, and performance highlights.
- More actions for clips e.g. preview, tag, share via slack
Outcome
Sadly I left Seismic before this feature was released but here are the plans we had for measuring the outcomes of the clips project.
Add Pendo guides for introducing clips when it’s released.
Add Pendo feedback prompts triggered by clip creation to gather sentiment and further improvements.
Release Clips in Spring 2024 to Early Access customers.
Conduct usability test and System Usability Scale survey on production to measure final delivery.
Iterate as needed.