Huddle
PERSONAL PROJECT
Huddle is a smart scheduling board which displays details about a meeting room’s current and following bookings. Mounted outside of the door of each boardroom, the interface is designed to keep staff updated with accurate schedule information and to assist reception staff with preparing the rooms as needed.
The Challenge
4mation Technologies hosted a 7-hour hackathon for their team members, which was aimed at solving internal pain points felt by staff members. Our team consisted of Dennis Ong as a back-end developer, Stacey Martin on product management and myself as designer and front-end developer. We chose to find a solution for team member’s mounting frustrations around meeting room booking conflicts.
Interviews with staff members revealed the following pain points:
Staff look for rooms on the fly, often without access to a device to check into room availability.
Not all of the five rooms at 4mation have the same capacity and features, such as the ability to make a conference call. This slows down staff’s productivity when certain rooms need to be shuffled around to suit the needs of the meeting.
Cancelled meetings fail to be removed from the calendar, leaving rooms sitting empty and showing false availability.
Staff go to their booked room, only to find it occupied by others who have jumped in without checking the room’s availability first.
In the heat of the moment, meetings that run over time are not updated in a timely fashion.
Reception staff need visibility on meeting details to help them schedule their workload in preparing meeting rooms. This is often done by moving back and forth between their desktop and the kitchen. Key information of interest is whether meeting is internal staff only or if clients will be visiting - hence needing snacks and water jugs refilled.
The Solution
“Their time was spent scoping out the meeting rooms to see where the tablets would be placed, making mockups, and simulating seeing the booking from across the room for readability.”
Get flexible and save time
Notice at a quick glance if a room is available, including details to signify whether it can be interrupted or moved to another room. Book instantly via the Quick Book interface, saving you time so you can get down to business faster.
Smooth transition
Reads and writes to your primary Google Calendar to sync your meetings across multiple meeting rooms. Barriers of adoption are removed by allowing changes to be inputted by both the Huddle and personal Google Calendar interface. Data is polled every 15 seconds to keep information accurate and up to date.
Accurate scheduling
Finished early? Free up the room for someone else on your way out with the Complete Meeting functionality. The quick one-click function ensures the calendar is kept accurate for other staff members.
The Outcome
The app was built using AngularJS and a pitch presentation created all within the 7-hour hackathon deadline. The project took out two of the three available awards that night, one for ‘Innovation & Creativity’ and ‘Best User Experience’.
Our team worked extremely well together, and post-hackathon agreed to polish and publish the app to the general public as a free service.
Attendees of 4mation's first hackathon.
“Their simple interface, which displays what’s booked in each meeting room in real-time, was a standout on the day. What made their solution so successful? Their processes and planning... They covered all aspects to make a very impressive solution which was put together so well that it will require very little refinement for us to actually use.”