Collaboration Insights for Webex provides private insights to individuals and teams to help combat workforce fatigue and empower personal well-being, team impact, and collaboration.

Webex is a collaboration platform from Cisco that makes hybrid work possible – bringing together meeting, messaging and calling into a single, unified application so teamwork is streamlined and flexible.

Client:
Collaboration AI
Webex Cisco
2021 - Present

My role:
Team manager
UX design
UX research
Data visualization

Team:
4 UX designers
Content creator
User resarchers

Tools:
Figma
Miro
Jira
Usertesting

Platforms:
MacOS
Windows

THE CHALLENGE

The goal of this project was to design an AI-powered tool that helps users create balance, connection, and smarter collaboration in the workplace.

Work has evolved more in the last few years than it has in the last decade. With 40% of office employees expected to work from home some portion of the week, and 90% of meetings expected to include remote participants, a hybrid way of working is here to stay. With it comes a new set of challenges to solve.

How can we support people in maintaining a good work-life balance, foster empathy and connections with co-workers, and help them work smarter, not longer, while ensuring they feel motivated and part of a team to improve retention?

THE PROCESS

01. EXPLORATION

User Research

Interviews and surveys were conducted with many users across multiple industries to understand:

• How they perceive their current collaboration habits.
• Challenges they face with managing communication and networking.
• Their awareness and use of tools that offer personal analytics (like weekly screen time reports or email digests).

• How users felt about data privacy in this context.

Key Findings:

• Information Overload: Users often felt overwhelmed by the volume of meetings and messages, leading to a reactive work style.
• Lack of Self-Awareness: Many users were unaware of how their time was spent across meetings, focus time, and communication.
• Networking Blind Spots: Users lacked awareness about key collaborators outside their immediate teams and often missed networking opportunities.

• Users were very concerned about whether managers would be able to see their activity and worried the results would affect their performance assessments.

Competitive Analysis

The main competitor in this arena was Microsoft Viva Insights. They had recently released this feature and had received a lot of feedback both positive and negative that we were very interested in understanding and learning from. Additionally Slack and Google were of interest.

Key takeaways:
• Privacy first - users should be the only ones who could see the data on their behavior.
• Don’t overload users with data.
• Focus on actionable recommendations.
• Encourage positive behavior.

• Be transparent with data and give users control.

02. PROBLEM DEFINITION

Exploratory Prototypes

To help define the problems we aimed to solve and clarify our goals, we created mockups and prototypes to explore possibilities with the product and engineering teams. Using these prototypes, we conducted another round of user studies to validate our hypotheses, which provided concrete ideas that helped secure leadership buy-in.

User Research 2

Using the exploratory prototypes, we engaged Webex users to help us define the categories we ultimately felt were the ones users cared about the most.

The outcome produced four areas to focus on:
• Effective meetings
• Work-life balance
• Connections
• Focus time

Design + Eng

A large part of creating a product like this relied on what we could technically do. What was feasible? What data do we have access to? Because of these valuable early conversations with our AI engineering team, they helped us to understand what problems we were able to tackle and which ones we could aim high for.

03. IDEATION

Data Visualization

Much exploration was done around data visualization to understand what would enhance and emphasize the story we were trying to tell, rather than be overwhelming or distracting.

Key things we considered were:
• Choosing the right chart type

• How to use color

• Highlighting key insights
• Prioritizing understanding

• Providing context
• Simplifying for clarity

Wireframing/
Prototyping

This phase of the project involved several rounds of meetings, discussions, and debates with the product, engineering, and design teams. The collaborative nature of the process was incredibly rewarding, as we combined our areas of expertise to solve problems beyond the typical boundaries of our roles. Shaping this feature required working with test databases to ensure the outcomes were meaningful and valuable, alongside multiple demos and check-ins with leadership to maintain alignment. It was a true team effort.

User Testing

Another round of user testing was done to understand whether users resonated with what we were showing them regarding their own behavior, if they felt reassured that their data was private to them alone and if they found value in the insights they were being shown.

Key Findings:
• Privacy and security were not a concern
• Users wanted to know whether their results were good compared to others
• Users wanted to be able to see the background data sometimes but not always

04. OUTCOME

Connections:
Improving relationship management

Our goal was to help users manage their professional relationships more effectively by providing a comprehensive view of their network and identifying areas where attention was needed. Through research we identified key pain points: difficulty tracking connections, staying updated, and prioritizing time with the right people.

What's new
To address this, we developed the "What's New" feature, which gives users actionable updates—such as colleagues in the news, relocations, or job changes—helping them stay informed and offering reasons to reach out.

Keep in touch
Managing a network can be time-consuming. The "Stay Connected" feature gives users a clear overview of key contacts, making it easier to focus on the relationships that matter most.

Direct reports
Managers emphasized the importance of regular communication with their teams. The "Team Communication" feature helps ensure consistent check-ins with direct reports, fostering better team dynamics.

Your top connections
This section helps users evaluate if they’re spending time with the right people and teams, ensuring their interactions align with their goals and that no important connection slips off the radar.

Your network
This view of your overall network provides a bird's-eye perspective of your daily collaborations, highlighting the people you interact with regularly and those you may be losing touch with.

Meetings:
Make them count

Meetings are a core part of work, but many users weren’t aware of how optimizing meeting habits can make them more productive. Inefficiencies, poor preparation, and time mismanagement often resulted in meetings that drag on without delivering value. This module was designed to help users not only improve the efficiency of their meetings but also increase their awareness of how they participate in them.

Stay on Schedule:
This feature tracks how often users join and end meetings on time. If meetings tend to run long or start late, it can signal disorganization. This insight helps users manage time better, leading to more focused and timely sessions.

Make the Right Impression:
We provide feedback on user behavior during meetings—whether their video is on, how often they’re messaging, and their speaking balance. By setting goals and tracking performance, users can adjust these behaviors to make a stronger, more professional impression.

Run Better Meetings:
This feature encourages best practices for leading meetings, like creating clear agendas and scheduling within team members' work hours. These small habits contribute significantly to improving meeting productivity and reducing time waste.

Focus time:
Find your
state of flow

Our goal was to encourage users to block out time for heads-down work free of distractions. Users reported meeting burnout from back to back meetings and a loss of productivity from being interrupted. Focus time can help you reach a state of "flow", which can lead to a 6-8x increase in creative problem solving.

Schedule focus time
This module shows you where blocks of time can be created to be more productive. It encourages scheduling to avoid having others add meetings to your day ad hoc and sends the signal that you are not to be disturbed.

Work-life balance

Users often struggled to maintain a healthy work-life balance, unaware of how much time they were spending working outside of regular hours and who they were engaging with during those times. This created challenges in managing personal time and led to burnout.

Meetings during quiet hours
This feature tracks after-hours work activity, showing users when and with whom they’re working outside of standard hours. By offering clear insights and trends, it helps users become more aware of their work habits and encourages them to adjust when necessary.

05. CHALLENGES

How do we drive action?

Insight cards are integrated into each module, offering key takeaways and highlights for users. We have worked to make the pop-overs attached to them actionable within the app, allowing users to respond in real-time.

Goal setting is another feature that empowers users to track their progress and focus on areas they want to improve.

The real value of these features comes from their ability to drive action—whether it's using insights to make changes or reaching out to make connections, users can turn
information into impact.

Who can see my data?

We made sure to make it clear how we managed users data and to allow users to opt-out on request. Users were initially cautious about sharing sensitive meeting and messaging data. We addressed this by making data control a core part of the onboarding process and providing clear explanations of how data would be used. In addition any insights that compared behavior were presented in aggregated form, ensuring no one person or team was called out or specifically mentioned.

How are we doing?

Constant feedback mechanisms on various levels of the feature were included so we could adjust and update and improve both algorithms and UX.

Finding the right tone

In early prototypes, we discovered that users were turned off by the tone of the copy in the insight cards. Any wording that came across as bossy, condescending, or nagging had the opposite effect of what we intended. To address this, we conducted multiple rounds of testing to refine the copy, ensuring it was helpful, supportive, and encouraging without being judgmental.

06. THE IMPACT

Featured at
Webex One

Collaboration Insights was front and center at WebexOne 2021, an annual in-person and virtual event focused on collaboration and customer experience that showcases our latest strategy and innovations.

65,000+ people registered
5.5M+ keynote views
25M+ #WebexOne social reach

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Who are
we helping?

Personal Insights has been integrated into the workflow of Webex users from 30,000+ organizations.

How can it be better?

The primary way collaboration insights could have more impact would be to extend the insights out of this tab and populate it throughout the Webex App in a contextual way.

Provide Contextual Insights:
Offering insights that are directly related to the user's current activities would make them more actionable and relevant. For instance, providing suggestions based on the specific tasks the user is working on or about to engage in would drive better results.

Integrate Features Seamlessly into User Workflow:
Many modules would be more effective if they were embedded into the user's daily workflow. For example, integrating focus time into the calendar with smart prompts or automatic suggestions while scheduling meetings would enhance productivity without extra effort.

Enable Automation for Routine Actions:
Allowing users to automate repetitive tasks could greatly improve efficiency. For example, automatically scheduling 1:1 meetings with direct reports at chosen intervals or ensuring a lunch break is added to the calendar daily would reduce manual work and promote work-life balance.

Let's build something amazing

Phone: 858.220.1459
Email: hello@leslieengler.com

EHG

What's newTo address this, we developed the "What's New" feature, which gives users actionable updates—such as colleagues in the news, relocations, or job changes—helping them stay informed and offering reasons to reach out.

Keep in touchManaging a network can be time-consuming. The "Stay Connected" feature gives users a clear overview of key contacts, making it easier to focus on the relationships that matter most.

Direct reportsManagers emphasized the importance of regular communication with their teams. The "Team Communication" feature helps ensure consistent check-ins with direct reports, fostering better team dynamics.

Your top connectionsThis section helps users evaluate if they’re spending time with the right people and teams, ensuring their interactions align with their goals and that no important connection slips off the radar.

Your networkThis view of your overall network provides a bird's-eye perspective of your daily collaborations, highlighting the people you interact with regularly and those you may be losing touch with.

Stay on Schedule:This feature tracks how often users join and end meetings on time. If meetings tend to run long or start late, it can signal disorganization. This insight helps users manage time better, leading to more focused and timely sessions.

Make the Right Impression:We provide feedback on user behavior during meetings—whether their video is on, how often they’re messaging, and their speaking balance. By setting goals and tracking performance, users can adjust these behaviors to make a stronger, more professional impression.

Run Better Meetings:This feature encourages best practices for leading meetings, like creating clear agendas and scheduling within team members' work hours. These small habits contribute significantly to improving meeting productivity and reducing time waste.

Schedule focus timeThis module shows you where blocks of time can be created to be more productive. It encourages scheduling to avoid having others add meetings to your day ad hoc and sends the signal that you are not to be disturbed.

Meetings during quiet hoursThis feature tracks after-hours work activity, showing users when and with whom they’re working outside of standard hours. By offering clear insights and trends, it helps users become more aware of their work habits and encourages them to adjust when necessary.