Time-X
Time-X is a calendar design that addresses meeting fatigue and improves digital well-being. It introduces 3 novel features: Meeting gap time, Required meeting purpose, and Post-meeting Debrief.
With added time between meetings, more information about meeting goals, and timely meeting feedback, the calendar shows promising potential to improve digital well-being for knowledge workers.
67%
95.4
Problem
Remote and hybrid workers face the issue of fatigue from back-to-back meetings. Breaks between meetings have been proven to be an effective solution - however, current calendar interfaces are not designed with meeting breaks in mind. Cold-calls are common in the workplace, and virtual collaboration tools do not offer the option to track meeting feedback.
Key Design Features
Meeting Gap Time: The goal of meeting gap time is to eliminate the stress of back-to-back meetings and provide workers with more breaks, since our literature review demonstrated the importance of break-taking for the well-being of remote workers.The meeting gap time consists of 3 parts – 5 minutes for preparation prior to meeting start, 5 minutes for debrief at the meeting conclusion, and then 5 minutes for rest post-meeting. This is graphically represented as P, Dand R on the calendar interface, with the associated colors of yellow, green and orange. Those 15 minutes are automatically added between each meeting and built into the worker’s schedule.
Required Meeting Purpose: Our user research shows that knowledge workers are frustrated with the number of unplanned calls they receive during the day. To reduce the number of calls and help knowledge workers make more informed decisions about participation, we designed an interface that requires users to state the purpose of a meeting or call.
Post-Meeting Debrief: Our user research equally demonstrated that knowledge workers experience a lack of timely feedback for their meetings. We designed a feature where after each meeting, a meeting debrief screen appears for the user. Once they complete the debrief, they are able to view feedback from the rest of the meeting attendees.
Gantt Chart Format: We selected the Gantt format due to our related work research pointing to the fact that with remote work, meetings had decreased in length. As observed in our competitive review, the Gantt format is more effective at displaying short meeting time information than the regular calendar format. We found that it was a good solution to graphically display the short 5 minute intervals of preparation, debrief and rest between each meeting.
Research Paper
Research paper available upon request.
Prototype
View the Figma prototype for interactive elements and animations.
