From Vision to Reality
Transforming PGi's Meeting Experience Through User-Centered Design
Background
The business objective was to create a converged PGi SaaS meeting product. Historically, PGi had two flagship meeting products: iMeet for small face to face meetings with video and GlobalMeet for large meetings and a primary focus on shared content. Both iMeet and GlobalMeet 4 were delivered in older web technologies like Flash and Java. Our new meeting app would be delivered in HTML and rely on WebRTC for video and content sharing. Our goal was to create an intuitive, frictionless and white-labeled meeting product that allowed our customers to collaborate in real-time with voice, video and content sharing.
Problem statement
The iMeet and GlobalMeet suite of applications are available for the web browser, desktop, iOS and Android. Some customers’ accounts are audio only while others have web conferencing. How do we begin to merge these products across multiple platforms to serve multiple user types?
My Key Contributions
During this project to create a converged PGi SaaS meeting product, I served as the design leader and strategic partner responsible for driving the successful transformation of PGi's meeting solutions. I managed and directed a talented design team of nine professionals while establishing the overall design direction and product strategy. My role involved extensive research and discovery work to understand user needs across both the iMeet and GlobalMeet user bases, as well as leading regular critiques and reviews to ensure design quality and consistency. I handled critical operational aspects including SCRUM team resource alignment, recruiting and hiring new talent, and overseeing design operations to maintain efficient workflows. As a key stakeholder and executive partner, I helped shape the convergence strategy and guided the development of a new design system that would support both the immediate web meeting experience and future mobile/desktop releases. A major focus of my work involved establishing and measuring clear metrics through competitive analysis and usability testing, setting ambitious 95% success rate targets for user interaction with meeting controls. Working closely with stakeholders across the organization, I helped ensure the design solution would effectively serve PGi's diverse customer base while enabling white-label capabilities and aligning design strategy to business goals.
Business Requirements
Convergence Strategy - Must support both GlobalMeet and iMeet feature sets
Customers - Must support existing customer base
Technology - Must serve as HTML replacement
Branding - Must support our new brand and be white-labeled to support multiple reseller brands
Market - Must surpass competition and existing products in ease of use
Layout style - Must be modular and responsive
Scale - Must scale to 125 participan
Process Focus: Design System
A new design language would be needed for us to successfully design, develop, launch and support GlobalMeet 5. I selected a designer from my team to solely focus on building out what would become the GlobalMeet design system. This design system is comprised of a design style guide that sets the visual language for the products and a front end component library for reuse and consistency across the product suite.
Process focus: Competitive Teardown
For our competitive analysis, we looked at our main competitor offerings as well as our existing GlobalMeet 4 product to get a baseline test of our existing product. We asked 15 questions about the discoverability of the the most important meeting functions.
Process focus: Usability Testing
We tested our own product and the competition for meeting controls discoverability and overall task success. What we learned is that there are huge failure points in all of these applications, and if we can fill those then there is great opportunity to rise above the competition by offering a usable, painless online collaboration space.
We set success targets that we wanted to achieve and measured them against the baseline test results. We wanted to target a success rate of 95%. This means that 95% of the time we wanted the user to correctly identify an element within 2-5 seconds. Measuring the success or failures of our first hypothesis for our new meeting room controls and layout.
Impact
Through a rigorous user-centered design process, we successfully transformed PGi's meeting experience into a modern, unified platform. By deeply understanding user needs and following a structured research and design methodology, we delivered an engaging, contemporary user interface that addressed key pain points in virtual collaboration. The new interface not only modernized the look and feel but also streamlined the user experience across all touchpoints. Starting with the web experience and rapidly expanding to mobile and desktop platforms, we created a cohesive product ecosystem that resonated with users and met our business objectives. Our iterative approach, focused on continuous measurement and improvement, ensured that each release enhanced the product's value proposition, ultimately creating a more scalable and competitive offering in the virtual meeting space.
Leveraging Design to Empower Sales & Unlock Revenue Opportunities
The Product Design department partnered with PGi Marketing and Sales on many lead generation and marketing campaigns. We supported our partners and colleagues by providing application screens, UX writing, product guidance and consultation. This video example highlights GlobalMeet Collaboration’s capabilities and lets potential customers see the product in action.
Team Credits
Created in collaboration with Tealium Product Design
Design Strategy, Team Leadership, Direction
Bill Victor
Design & Research
Atu Nii-Owoo, Taa Sittisomsap, Therese Mushock, Andrew Stewart, Ben Anderson, Nam Nguyen, Rishi Kaneria