Trelliswork Roundtable
Wait, Sarah did you go yet?
Company - Trelliswork
Problem - Meetings need a way to see who has and has not spoken yet, while also calling on the next speaker without slowing down the meeting’s momentum.
Trelliswork
From 2022 to 2024, I worked with friends on a small startup called Trelliswork. Our goal was to help teams and managers keep track of meeting tasks and accountability in remote work.
As an early priority, we aimed to solve a common issue: tracking who had spoken during group check-ins, workshops, and team-building activities.
“And another thing. We can’t have everybody talking at once. We’ll have to have ‘Hands up’ like at school.” . . . “Then I’ll give him the conch. . . . I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking.”
Problem
How many times have you been in a remote meeting and said something to the effect of…
“Wait…Sarah, did you go yet?”
“Who wants to start?”
“I always call on the same people…”
In-person interactions, like eye contact and gestures or spatial cues like tables and standing circles, are missing in remote settings. There is a need to make it easier to see who has spoken or who wants to speak, and to call on the next person. Making these actions more natural would reduce friction and wasted time while also calming some social anxiety.
Designing
Requirements
Show who is currently speaking
Show who has spoken
Allow for both random and specific selection of the next speaker
Allow speakers to “uncheck” and add themselves back into the pool of “have not spoken”
Remember states as users arrive and depart
Slot neatly into the rest of the user session and meeting topic areas of the app.
Iterations Design process
Most of the design iteration had to do with balancing visual appeal while conveying status. The basic mechanisms of the feature seemed clear from the requirements, but how to convey state in a way that was clear took a few rounds.
Key Questions
How much are we ok obscuring faces to show state?
What iconography matches “current speaker?”
*See notes below each image
A version of the Meeting Session screen that the Roundtable will be featured on.
Early designs tried the idea of featuring the speaker in the centre. One of the major problems is which side, right or left, is the "to speak" pool vs. "has spoken".
Next was the problem of tackling how to show a user has spoken. This gray design was rejected because our visual designer make the correct case that we needed to make sure the visual didn't look negative or disabled.
Also the trick is how to make the current speaker clear enough. A microphone icon was used here to try to indicate. We thought it was being lost a bit. To the right is a small variation on how to indicated "spoken" state.
This was the first version of the design that started to feel correct. Though, there was still some consternation about completely obscuring our users faces with icons and overlays.
Then the mighty CONCH icon was brought down from the heavens to solve all of our problems.
Product
“Using the roundtable in Trelliswork makes us focus on the activity as opposed to the logistics. It makes our meetings less awkward and more fun.”
The resulting product was a immense success. It was a key factor in the enjoyment of the product for our early users. It was not going to sell the product but it added to the enjoyment and stickiness of the product for the daily users.
The final design as launched
A Roundtable enabled on a topic in the meeting screen
Of course the roundtable worked exceptionally well with our Icebreaker activity as well