Meeting Controls: Usability Improvements
Meeting controls were hard to find and unclear to use. That led to low adoption of one of Topicflow’s most important features, the meeting page, which powers everything from AI summaries to performance insights. We redesigned the controls to make them more discoverable, more intuitive, and more useful, without cluttering the interface.
The Problem
The meeting page is central to Topicflow. It’s where teams track agendas and notes, and where we surface AI-generated recaps, goals, and action items. It also hosts our notetaker bot, one of the main ways we capture meeting data.
But the core meeting controls (join, notetaker settings, permissions, sidebar, layout toggles) lived in a thin top bar, represented only by icons. There were no labels, no onboarding, and no clear hierarchy. Most users didn’t even know the controls were there.
That led to:
- Low usage of meeting features
- Missed opportunities for automatic data capture
- Friction in understanding how Topicflow works
This wasn’t just a UI issue, it was blocking the adoption of our core value proposition.
What We Shipped & Why It Mattered
It took a few iterations before we were happy with our solution (and tested it internally).
Attempt 1: Fixed Bottom Bar
Our first move was to pull the controls down to a fixed bar at the bottom of the meeting page. The idea was simple: make the controls impossible to miss. It worked in that sense, users saw them. But the bar felt heavy. It pulled focus away from the content, especially on smaller screens. And because we still used icon-only buttons, users had trouble understanding what the controls actually did. Labeling everything made the bar feel bloated.
Attempt 2: Labeled Top Bar with Nested Actions
We brought the controls back to the top, added labels, and nested some actions into dropdowns. It felt cleaner and more spacious. But this version still hid key states (like whether the notetaker was running), and some important actions were buried. We’d fixed visibility, but not clarity.
Final Version: Simplified Top Bar, Grouped Actions, Exposed States
In the final design, we leaned into clarity over minimalism. We split actions into two categories:
- Meeting-level actions moved into the meeting details section
- Notetaker-related actions stayed up top
We labeled important controls directly, reduced reliance on hover, and added visible system states so users always knew what was happening. We also made it easy to add the notetaker to any meeting, even if it hadn’t been enabled ahead of time.
This version preserved screen space, gave users better context, and made the meeting experience easier to manage.
Results (2 Weeks after launch)
The redesigned controls reduced the confusion that had been blocking adoption.
Internal testing showed significantly faster task completion.
In customer calls post-launch, users could describe what each control did without prompting.
Support tickets related to “how to use meeting features” dropped.
Enabled us to move forward with improvements to other meeting types (1:1s, team syncs, etc.).
