Running doctor appointments like the best-designed meetings
By: Katie Mccurdy
Tags: Service Design, Healthcare, User Experience, Design

First, a few strategies for creating better meetings

Prepare and design appropriate activities

Great meetings don’t just happen. Someone has thought about the goals of the meeting — what are we trying to accomplish, and what are the best means of doing so? Productive, satisfying and fun meetings don’t follow the same template as all other meetings; they are specifically designed. For instance, if I want to get a whole team on the same page about our end users are and their needs, I’m not going to have one team member get up and drone over a powerpoint while everyone else zones out. We’re going to workshop it and get everyone participating.

What are our goals? What should we do?

And this meeting preparation — it takes time. I would never show up to a meeting unsure what I want to talk about or what we’re going to do. What a waste! As a designer and facilitator I have spent a lot of time and energy making sure that team meetings have a point, that the activities are well-designed, and that there is chocolate on the table for morale and endorphins.

Make things visual

Great meetings are always visual. Research has shown that people can only hold about four pieces of information (or the last 30 seconds of things they’ve recently heard or seen) in their ‘working’ memory at one time. Visuals can help:

“Listening to someone while looking at a complimentary photograph or drawing increases the likelihood of committing something to working memory.” (Meeting Design, p.22) “Your brain finds more meaning by combining listening with seeing or touch” (Meeting Design, p.32)

Visual facilitation can also help ensure the people in the room have a common understanding. In many meetings I’ve jumped up to the whiteboard to sketch out a diagram or simply jot down key points; this serves as a visual prototype of the conversation we are having and allows me to get immediate feedback if I’ve gotten something wrong. This practice has appeared useful for the people in the room; I’ve observed that they usually glance back at the board often and refer to it repeatedly while talking.

Invite participation

Effectively involving meeting attendees in discussion, brainstorming and decision-making is an art. The default in most meetings is freeform talking, which gives more verbally-oriented people all the attention, while others sit quietly and don’t have a chance to share their thoughts. The best way I’ve learned to invite participation is to incorporate quiet time during which everyone writes down their ideas on sticky notes, and then afterward go around the room so each person can share what they wrote. It’s a great way to make sure everyone’s ideas are surfaced, and it helps us avoid narrowing our world of possibilities too soon.

Get the right people in the room

A common issue with meetings is that there are too many people or the wrong people in attendance. Thinking through the goals of a meeting helps determine who should be there; and if there’s no goal or point to a meeting, canceling it is the smartest and most productive thing to do.