Integra — the story of online meetings

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The COVID-19 pandemic has halted face-to-face meetings and confined remote interactions to formal meetings. In response, the company I was working with developed Integra, a SaaS application designed to integrate people online.

At the early stages of my engagement with the company as a Product Designer, we followed the design thinking methodology of software development. We asked significant questions to deeply understand the problem, Company X's goals, resources, and limitations.

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We began by identifying the target audience for the online integration platform. We conducted interviews with current clients who suffered due to canceled events and discovered that corporate companies still desired to maintain their pre-pandemic event standards, citing a decline in employee motivation. To test our hypothesis, I interviewed people who worked remotely in companies with over 100 employees. They expressed a need to converse with colleagues outside of work-related projects and miss incidental opportunities to mix with strangers in the office.

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Based on our research, we defined the problem statement: employees are not able to experience the same working atmosphere as in the office due to the pandemic, and there are currently no integration events. Employee motivation has decreased, and newcomers have little to no opportunity to meet colleagues out of their immediate teams.

Our platform is designed for companies with 100 or more employees and the employees themselves. Using the Objective and Key Results method, we set a goal to create a modern platform to help people connect online and generate survivable income comparable to the previous year to remain on the market beyond the pandemic.

 

Our key results were to acquire at least 20 customers in the second quarter of 2021, generate comparable revenue to the second quarter of the year, and retain at least 30% of customers who used our product for subsequent and recurring events.

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To meet the needs of our users, we brainstormed possible solutions and functionalities for the Integra platform. Based on reliable research and competitor analysis, the platform includes video streaming with the main speaker, chat function with group creation capability, and Q&A for anonymous questions to a speaker, networking with the possibility to draw a random person who attends the event, group sessions, workshop sessions, a discussion panel with selected speakers, gamification to engage and motivate employees with rewards, and the capability to order meals sponsored by the organizer or a gift box.