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leits / MeetingBar

🇺🇦 Your meetings at your fingertips in the macOS menu bar
https://meetingbar.app
Apache License 2.0
4.51k stars 199 forks source link

💪 [Feature] UX improvements to help spot upcoming meetings ahead of time #145

Open MrBeardedGuy opened 3 years ago

MrBeardedGuy commented 3 years ago

Kudos to all the talented people working on this great app. 🎉
I wanted to suggest an improvement. Please do let me know your thoughts.

Main UX issue Users with busy calendars rely on Meeting Bar to know if they have to prepare for the next upcoming meeting. When meetings are overlapping it's a bit trickier knowing exactly what's the next meeting and when it will be.

In a scenario like the one below, users will see "Meeting one" + remaining time for the whole duration of the first meeting until few minutes before "Meeting 2" when Meeting bar could trigger a notification. This might lead users into forgetting they have that super important meeting they need to prepare for (Meeting2).

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UX Proposal for overlapping meetings From a UX perspective it's more important to surface the time to the next upcoming meeting instead of the current one. I wanted to suggest:

  1. do not display the current meeting name and remaining time when a meeting has started (it's kinda obvious I know what meeting I'm attending if I'm already in it)
  2. instead right after a meeting starts show the next upcoming one with its name and the time remaining until it starts.

Let me know if it makes sense

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

Thanks for your idea @MrBeardedGuy !

I like the idea, but honestly I also like to see how much time I have in the current meeting.

I have started to think about that a few days ago and thought about a UX to have both. It is not so easy with the possibilities of the macos menus to display both. I can image that it makes sense to have 2 lines in the status menu - one line displays the next meeting, another line the current meeting... I do not know if this makes sense...

image

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Alternative 2 was to display the current and next meeting in alternation, but I believe this will flicker too much and would distract the user. WDYT? @leits - what is your opinion?

leits commented 3 years ago

Interesting idea, @jgoldhammer! But I think you're right, this accumulation may be too heavy.

We are now showing the countdown to the next meeting 15 minutes before. @MrBeardedGuy, how do you think, 30 minutes will be enough?

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

Maybe this should be configurable by the user? 30 minutes would be too much for me ...

MrBeardedGuy commented 3 years ago

I personally would just love to see right away what's the next upcoming meeting. But that's me. An arbitrary number (15min or 30min) might be too little or too much (as @jgoldhammer mentioned previously).

I like @jgoldhammer's idea to have a use-facing setting to control this value.

leits commented 3 years ago

Or what about the explicit option "show current meeting", disabling which will automatically show only the following?

MrBeardedGuy commented 3 years ago

Yeah that works too.

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

Summary:

For me option 2 is a dangerous setting: If you miss a meeting for 1 minute, you won´t see in the status menubar that a current meeting is running. I would never activate option 2, so please set option 1 as default... :-)

Besides that I do not see any usecase for the second option (not showing the current meeting anymore) because having a flexible control with a user configurable time before the next meeting would be displayed would make more sense for me. Just my 2 cents :-)

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

How to proceed here @leits ?

leits commented 3 years ago

I need some time to think about it, @jgoldhammer.

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

I think, we need more time here, so I will assign it to our backlog.

jgoldhammer commented 3 years ago

Ping :-) How to proceed here?

leits commented 3 years ago

Summary:

setting "show current meeting" has two options and influences the status bar menu entry only (the menu entries are not affected)
    option 1 (true) always shows the current meeting and switches to the next meeting 15 minutes before
    option 2 (false) always shows the next meeting regardless how long the current meeting takes and how long the current meeting is already running. There will be no more "Current meeting (30 min left)", even not after 1 minute the meeting has started...

For me option 2 is a dangerous setting: If you miss a meeting for 1 minute, you won´t see in the status menubar that a current meeting is running. I would never activate option 2, so please set option 1 as default... :-)

How about this, but for option 2, do not immediately switch to the next meeting, but show the current meeting for 3 minutes?

MrBeardedGuy commented 3 years ago

This sounds a fair solution. The system can default to option 1 while giving the user the opportunity to switch to option 2 if needed.

I agree with @leits, might be worth persisting the current meeting name in case the user is late for option 2. I suggest to use 7 minutes instead of 3. Most calendars out there have the minimum meeting default duration set to 15min. If you're late for half of that time might be worth assuming that you want to skip the meeting altogether no?

waynehoover commented 1 year ago

Any updates on adding this?