vituliani
Case study 06

Meetings that leave a record.

A Microsoft Teams add-on for meeting management: build the agenda before the call, capture notes, tasks and decisions during it, and get a protocol out of it automatically afterwards.

Role Lead product designer
Process Research, implement, test
Platform Teams add-on
Year 2022
agenda app
Agenda App calendar view inside Microsoft Teams
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01 / The problem

A meeting ends and the outcome disappears.

Organising an effective meeting in Teams means juggling tools that feel heavier than the meeting itself. The agenda lives in a chat message, notes in someone's notebook, decisions nowhere at all. A week later nobody can prove what was agreed or who owns the next step.

Before Agenda setup that takes longer than the meeting
During No way to mark a decision as it is made
After Protocols written by hand, or not written at all
02 / Research

Four executives, one heuristic review, seven findings.

I interviewed four executives about how they prepare, run and follow up on meetings, then ran a heuristic evaluation of competing add-ons alongside their public user feedback. An affinity diagram turned the raw quotes into the requirement list the MVP was scoped from.

Competitive review
Competitive review of meeting add-ons
Affinity diagram
Affinity diagram of interview quotes
Seven findings that shaped the MVP
01 Add participants by filter, from groups or past meetings.
02 Decisions must be documented as first-class objects.
03 Everyone in the room should take part in deciding.
04 Tasks belong on the agenda item, not in a separate tool.
05 Track the time allocated to each item, and the total.
06 Save an agenda structure and reuse it next time.
07 Attach photos, files or links to a specific item.
03 / Structure

Draw the path before the screens.

Before any screen existed I mapped the objects of the domain, meeting, agenda, item, task, decision and participant, and the path a user takes through them. Charting the flow is where the template branch was found: people rarely start an agenda from nothing, so “do you have a template?” had to be a step in the product, not a preference buried in settings.

Ontology map, create an agenda
Ontology map and user flow for creating an agenda
04 / Design strategy

Borrow the calendar people already know.

The main page deliberately mirrors the Teams calendar: same week grid, same density, same interaction. Nothing new to learn before the first agenda. Meetings that already carry one are marked inline, and the filter answers the only questions admins ask, with agenda, with minutes, mine.

Week view, with filters
Week view with agenda filters
05 / Building an agenda

From scratch, or from last week.

Empty state
Empty state before an agenda exists
The item
A single agenda item with tasks and time
Templates
Reusable agenda templates
Attachments
Attachments on an agenda item
06 / During and after

Voting in the room, a protocol out of it.

Voting turns a discussion into a recorded outcome: participants vote on flagged items and results are visible live, so a decision has a number attached instead of a memory. Notes, tasks and documents are captured against the item they came from.

When the meeting closes, the app compiles the report: attendance, decisions, tasks, shared documents. Distribute it digitally or print it as the formal protocol.

The agenda in the meeting
The agenda open during a meeting
Meeting attendance report
Meeting attendance and decision report
07 / Test

Validated remotely, refined daily.

Remote usability testing on the MVP flows confirmed the calendar-first structure and sent the participant filter back for a rebuild: individual users and groups now live in two clearly separated sections instead of one merged list.

Working with the development team every day kept the scope honest. What shipped is the smallest version that still turns a meeting into a record.