Overview
Ahå, inclusive-collective features for online meeting, leveraging engagement by fostering natural communication with the smart translation of responses. By redefining the new participation mode that respecting user’s perform boundaries in distributed workspace, it offer more flexibility and effectiveness in hybrid collaboration.
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We abstracted from the fatigue phenomenon and nuanced emotion gaps from countless teleconferencing. The odd interactions thru existed mediums demotivate us, “ Are people listening? ”,  people were confused due to the lack of active responses, even feel insecure to stand out. Under this rigid condition, the inevitable unnatural actions, like fake smile or nod hardly for showing self-involvement, also intensify the drain feeling.
Experience Principle
Stirring holistic engagement "from individuals to teams" in online meeting era.
Enhancing Behaviour
The natural responses, as in face to face conversations, are always muted or seen as distraction in hybrid scene. The subtle sound reactions, like “aha” or “hmm”, would be brought back and real-time translated into abstract visuals.
Collective Approach
The subjective response are sometime hidden in groups. Collective calculation would show average engagement level. People could be aware of the diversity of stances, making proper actions for meetings or works in time.
Personalisation
The natural subjective responses may sometimes be misinterpreted in different contexts or culture. AI accurate translation based on user’s expression preferences would simplified communication in intuitive visualisation.
Keep Privacy, Keep Inclusive
The subjective responses are sometime interfered by the herd mentality. Visual translation show all reactions in anonymous (“public” as option), allowing people equally express without being guilty for showing different opinions.
Design Concept
Reactive Mode: Flexible pivot that effective translating responses in clarity
Ahå provides an option for people to present and be professional in meeting without relying on video, It reduce invaded feeling of private space and distractions of unreadable expressions in dynamic videos. Participate in reactive mode, where between mute and unmute, the smart voice tracking function would convert response sounds into straightforward visuals, instead of presenting it as distracted sounds that interrupting others' speaking, so people could better engage without being put in the spot or overlooked.
Background Noise
Response Sound
Speech Sound
Collective Engagement Interfaces: Widgets and Sound Sensitive Effects
Ahå support different online meeting platforms with 3 main embedded presents. Based on personalised training, it sort sound reactions into 3 types, the height of the waves represent the sum of real-time reacting, and the confetti effect would be triggered and presented when the applause reactions were recognised and collected 👏.
Hesitant
Neutral
Positive
Gateway
Research to Rescope with Stakeholders:
Leverage “Engagement” to enhance hybrid experience with professional settings
This project was collaborated with the clients, who focus on neutral audio and video conferencing products, to cope the challenge of high-intensity and high-density online meetings in pandemic situation. Our goal is to seek potentials for product development by enabling professional work performance in hybrid practices.

From testing existing hardwares within software experience to "user stories" investigation in ethnographic approach, we clustered the stakeholders’ energy consumption into 4 categories to understand why people keep resistance for hybrid meeting. We deduced that the settings were not fit for diverse ways of working in office and home workspace, and those mediums cause more emotional labor works in communication, which actually caused the vicious circle of endless meeting.

In a word, the less engagement, the more meeting, over and over again. Hence, we negotiated with clients to rescope “engagement” as the design pillar in user experience, which is the valued trigger that upgrading hardware through software to unleash the competitiveness of professional products.
Synthesised Insights of User Stories → Hybrid “Engagement”
Refine Concepts in Nested Situation Layers:
Empowering natural sound expression into "inclusive" team engagement
To better understand how engagement reduce by current meeting setting, we had a immersive workshop with stakeholders, which people were required to collaborated in different modalities in both listener and presenter roles. We reflected that the rough switch of present mode actually caused the huge lag space of engagement. While video because distraction or bring pressure, sound as the quick effective access, also become unnatural and unsafe in between mute or unmute mode. The limited external condition lead the “no voice” situation, at this point, we decided to take the natural sound response as innovation opportunity.

In prioritisation discussion, we summarised the UX model of engagement to clarified the interconnection of individuals and team's behaviour from this awkward frozen moments, since the engagement is hard to measure in dynamic situation, people feel insecure to voice themselves if they cannot well-read the room. From deeper internal reason, people less participate when the team’s vibe is too vague for "inclusiveness", sometimes people discouraged by the situation and keep quite for different opinions. Therefore, to stimulate the contribution for engagement from external to internal, from diversity to equity, “collective" but “private” matters.
Immersive workshop → Natural sound expression as opportunity
UX Model → Inclusiveness from external to internal
Takeaways
The biggest challenge in project is to disassemble situations in non-linear approach, since the components always interweave with each other, the user needs are from the layer of individual’s inner to medium to group impact. The medium that drive mutual change in interactions, would be a good entry point for designers to see and map out holistic situation. To said, the first step to design user experience is to specified interaction, could from a vicious circle or just a mundane loop.