Introduction

Co-annotations in Meet

Google Meet

Google Meet is a video conferencing platform that allows users to hold online meetings, video calls, and conferences. It features high-quality video and audio, screen sharing, meeting scheduling, and integration with Google Workspace. 

Google Meet targets a wide range customer base, including businesses of all sizes, educational institutions, personal use, and non-profit organizations.

What are annotations?

🖥️

Annotations enable real-time drawing and highlighting on shared screens, making meetings more interactive.

Problem

Design challenge

Project Goals

This case study details my end-to-end design journey for the follow up to GA co-annotations feature in Google Meet. By enabling presenters to add multiple annotators, this enhancement directly addressed user pain points and resulted in a more intuitive and collaborative experience for real-time annotation during meetings.

Team
Lead UX interaction designer

Product manager

Software engineer manager

Software engineer

Tools
Figma

Google Workspace

Material Design 3

Workspace Design system

My Role
UX Designer


Designed for larger meetings, this update streamlines the presenter's ability to choose a larger group of participants to annotate on screen. The new modal makes this selection process easier.

Although Google Meet provides two methods for presenters to add co-annotators—via the people panel and people tile overflow menus—research reveals a lack of discoverability. 

This concealment in the user interface is preventing presenters from effectively leveraging the co-annotation feature, hindering seamless collaborative presentations.

What do we want to achieve?

Increase discoverability of co-annotations

With a current low discoverability rate, we expect to increase visibility through upcoming updates, including a new entry point.

Process

Existing entry points to add co-annotators

The second existing entry point for selecting co-annotators is located within the people panel

2. People panel

Presenter clicks the people panel

  1. Video tile

Meet currently has two entry points to assign co-annotators one of which is directly from a participant's video tile

Presenter hovers over video tile

Educators/trainers

Insights

People panel in Meet

Low fidelity

✏️

Users can utilize a variety of tools, such as pens and text boxes, to visually communicate during presentations.

Collaborative teams

Google Drive

I explored bulk selection models to enhance the annotations feature and improve discoverability through a new entry point.

Timeline
July - August 2024

Shipped
December 2024

Annotation Users

Researching current multi-select models at Google

Design 1

Design 2

Design 3

Presenter clicks ‘Add as co-annotator’

Presenter clicks ‘Add as co-annotator’

Breakout rooms in Meet

Presenters

Google Chat

Google Calendar

👥

This feature enhances engagement and clarity, transforming standard screen sharing into a collaborative experience with co-annotators.

Enable adding co-annotators in bulk

Option 1

Results

Design proposal

Solution

High fidelity

Overview of the high fidelity iterations for co-annotator selection

Chosen design solution for bulk selection

Number of annotators

Number of participants

Dual list view

To increase discoverability of co-annotation we will introduce an entry point in the tool menu

The presenter checks off select all box to allow all contributors in meeting to annotate and clicks Update

The presenter will be notified with a message that changes have been made

Key takeaways

Bulk select

Collapsible

Option 3

Launched

What’s next?

Moving forward, we're excited to explore promising avenues for enhancing this feature, specifically focusing on automating co-annotator assignments, particularly within smaller meetings and for pre-assigned co-hosts. 


This targeted approach holds strong potential to streamline collaboration and ultimately improve the feature's visibility and utility for our users.

Following initial feedback and a design critique session with fellow designers, I focused on the exploration of visual design options for Design 3.

MVP design pivot

Final spec

User flow

Search for participants

Large meetings

Option 2

While collaborating closely with our engineering team, we identified technical limitations and timeline constraints for our proposed design. 


To ensure a successful MVP launch within the given timeframe, we made a strategic decision to iterate the design. This involved scoping down to a single-list implementation, which allowed us to deliver core functionality to users without compromising the launch schedule.

While the initial launch of this feature didn't yield the significant boost in discoverability we had hoped for, it provided invaluable insights as an early experimental step in shaping our product direction. 


We learned a great deal about user behavior and feature interaction, which will directly inform our next iterations.