A timer to gamify remote stand-up meetings
Empower your agile team with Daily Toast.
Are you trapped in boundless stand-up meetings? Alignment rituals are crucial but often tedious.
Daily meetings need to be agile and efficient but some colleagues may have a hard time synthesizing their speech in a minute. Participants must focus on accomplishments, goals, and obstacles but some would ramble on specific technical details unnecessary for the rest of the team. In these situations, it’s difficult to tell them to make it short without being rude.
That’s why we launched dailytoast.io, a free timer to energize fun daily alignment meetings (either in the office or by video call).
The briefing
I was having a coffee with Marina Virgili and Sergi Palou complaining about how endless where our daily meetings. Therefore, we agreed that a tool designed to handle these situations was required, and so, the complaint became a “HMW” question:
How Might We provide a timer to our agile teams to run stand-up meetings in a fun way?
The concept idea
Thus, we decided to perform an ideation brainstorm on the tablecloths and among all the madness we found one promising idea:
A gamified timer that shows the time limit as a cooking status of a toast so meeting attendees must avoid burning it during their speech time.
The design principles
Before starting to expand the idea, we checked the current exiting timers for scrum and agile rituals. All of them were designed as tools: totally functional and totally forgettable because being usable is not enough.
To avoid coming up with another mundane timer I wrote down four design principles that may define our product. These criteria help us to take design decisions and filter concept solutions after the ideation stage:
1 — From grave to AMUSING: Stand-up meetings are the team’s first daily contact, so it should feel like an ice-breaking game.
2 — From over designed to DIRECT: Users should not waste time setting the tool for the meeting. If the set up takes too long the tool will be a burden instead of a help.
3 — From individual to TEAMED: Stand-up meeting's purpose is team alignment. Our timer must judge overall team time, not the individual time.
4 — From supervisor to EVANGELIZER: It must drive the whole team into an agile mindset without making anyone feel uncomfortable.
So knowing that our final design must be amusing, direct, teamed and evangelizer I was ready to start to sketch.
The sacrificial concept: Round 1
Sacrificial concepts are sketches to visualize rough ideas and get a first impression from users before going into the details. To evaluate our idea I made three quick mockups to show the different stages of the timer.
The outcome was a disaster. poor feedback and a total lack of interest in the product. Surely it was not perceived as amusing therefore it was not complying with the design principles that I had imposed.
My colleagues never explored variants and gradually it became another lost idea in my notebook.
That was in 2018.
The sacrificial concept: Round 2
Two years later, just for the fun of it, I decided to take the concept and work on it in a different way.
So instead of facing it from the rational and analytic UX side, I pushed myself to approach it from the visceral side. Without thinking if it may be functional or not. Looking for something engaging in terms of interaction and visualization. Just working on the experience.
I quite liked the outcome and I posted it on my Instagram stories waiting for feedback.
This time assessment was much better. People finally perceived it as something playful and delightful so I felt being on the right track and ready to start to detail it.
The develop-moment
Some ideas remain ready waiting for the right moment to be assembled. If I think about the design process of this kind of personal project it usually looks like this:
I turn a personal concern in a challenge, I explore and iterate solutions in a fun and chill way since a justification to build it pops up.
In May 2020 the COVID-19 confinement began and people started working from home. Efficient alignment meetings become even more necessary and that was the justification I was waiting for. We were thinking to build something to make remote work less tedious for our fellas and Ian Gehlhaar came with a great idea to redesign and develop Daily Toast for the current scenario.
Indeed it solved one of the main concerns during the test sessions, the fact that only the person holding the phone really looks at it. Developing a website that people may share during a video call will make everything more immersive and participative.
The final design
It was time to get down to work, so we designed all the missing interactions and interfaces according to previously defined design principles:
1 — AMUSING: It’s a game and according to how long each participant has taken, Daily Toast will visualize the score as a cartoonish toast.
2 — DIRECT: To make it straightforward, Daily Toast avoids forms or profiles. The scrum master lands into the screen and only taps the time per participant. We don’t need to set the total meeting time or the number of participants.
3 — TEAMED: The score of the meeting is displayed without pointing to anyone. Looking at the total as a team and encouraging participants to use their time without being rushed (a raw toast is also unacceptable).
4 — EVANGELIZER: Friendly tips to help teams to find his way to perform stand-up meetings and generate awareness.
The test
At the current stage, our Fail Fast colleagues are using this timer for internal meetings and external workshops. We are collecting insights from all of them for further iteration but we know each team has its methodologies and each project its contexts so we would love to encourage other people to use it and share the experience with us.
Daily Toast has already been launched and it is available to everyone here.
Feel free to use it during your meetings and, if you want to share any thoughts, just contact me.
We always keep iterating!
