PacePerfect
Overview
People with disabilities experience lower employment than their non-disabled peers. For those who are employed, ongoing barriers often impact their career growth and limit equitable workplace experiences.
Disability Employment Research & Designathon was an Amazon internal event that focused on working backwards from Amazon employees with disabilities to co-create the solution that improves employment opportunities.
Challenge & Solution
Key challenges included the fast-paced nature of the five-day designathon, which required rapid ideation, research, and testing, all while ensuring the solution was both practical and impactful.
The result was PacePerfect, a desktop application developed to help neurodivergent employees process information more effectively during meetings and training sessions. PacePerfect was created to empower employees to focus on what’s important without the cognitive overload.
timeframe
Five days
my role
UX/UI design, User research
Around 15–20% of the world population is neurodiverse. They think, experience and interact in a unique way. How do we invent ways of working that increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities?
Before conducting user research, we were uncertain about the main challenges faced by neurodiverse employees. Initially, our focus was on enhancing training platforms to offer greater flexibility.
Hypothesis
How might we enhance the video playback controls on the training platforms for neurodivergent employees?
Research insights/validate ideas
Given our limited timeframe, we conducted interviews with three individuals, each with different neurodivergent conditions, to validate our initial hypothesis around the benefits of playback controls and to explore any additional challenges they face in the workplace.
As we delved deeper into user research, it became evident that their challenges extended beyond video playback controls. Many participants shared difficulties with processing information in real-time during virtual meetings. This insight led us to broaden our problem statement, shifting our focus from just enhancing training platforms to also addressing support solutions for virtual meetings.
Here's what we discovered:
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“When someone is speaking while screen-sharing, and if another person jumps into the conversation, I immediately get distracted.”
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“I struggle to keep up with the discussion during the meeting. Sometimes I miss details or forget important topics after the meeting ends.”
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“I always need an extra hour or two after the meeting to organize the meeting notes and figure out the next steps.”
Our team pivoted and refined our problem statement:
How might we enhance the information processing experience of neurodivergent employees during virtual audiovisual communications, such as meetings, broadcasts, and trainings, to ensure active engagement and clear takeaways?
Potential solutions
Key Features & Pain Points Addressed
Centralized Meeting Repository:
All meetings are stored in one place, allowing users to easily revisit and review past notes.
AI-Generated Summaries:
Automatically generates concise summaries, so even if users get distracted during the meeting, they can quickly catch up on what was missed.
Auto-Generated To-Do Lists:
Extracts and organizes action items into a to-do list, saving users the extra time needed to manually compile notes and tasks after the meeting.
After knowing what feature we would like to have in our platform, we began to research what are some of the available products in the market that has the features that could address the user's needs.
Competitor analysis
Ideation
After completing the user research and competitor analysis, I quickly put together a dashboard view outlining all the desired features.
Wireframes
A wireframe of the interface was sent out to the research participants to inquire what could be added, removed or improved from the current stage. There were two pieces of feedacks that stood out.
Design iterations - Optimizing for Text Overload & Visual Accessibility
Digestible Content: The meeting summaries are broken down into smaller, easy-to-read bullet points.
Visual Enhancements: Incorporated icons, diagrams, and color-coded highlights to support visual learners and those with dyslexia, ensuring information is clear and accessible.
Visual branding
High fidelity wireframes
How it works?
PacePerfect is designed to run alongside virtual meeting platforms. Simply open PacePerfect, and once the meeting begins, hit “Start Recording.” The platform will automatically capture and transcribe the meeting in real-time.
