Carolien Postma is used to testing and retesting (and retesting) new features. She’s a user experience (UX) researcher at Google, a role she describes as “making sure that whatever we build and create, that it actually creates value for our users and that it actually does what our users need it to do.”

Over the past nine months, she’s been part of the team testing the upcoming emoji reactions for Google Meet. “This release was about giving people an easy way to express their feelings and feedback in a way that helped everyone in a call feel more connected,” Carolien says. “This was a fun one, too, because it’s something I can point to that makes my work tangible!”

While the work was certainly fun, it was also important: Emoji help teams celebrate wins and offer support, and it’s important they represent everyone. Because of this, there were plenty of research hours behind the project. Here are a few of the things Carolien and her fellow UX researchers on the team investigated, and how this work turned up in the final designs.

Emoji for all.

Carolien and her team worked hard to ensure choosing the right emoji was seamless. “We wanted to include emoji that are universally understood, and mean the same or similar things across cultures,” Carolien says. Because other Google products use emoji and emoji reactions, they were able to take a look at this research to inform the new feature. You’ll see that the experience is configured in a way that lets people easily give a thumbs up, clap or heart.

It’s all in the timing.

Another design choice made as a result of testing was the emoji reactions’ “rhythm.” When Meet participants click an emoji, it floats up across the screen — and when multiple people do this, they all do so with specific timing. It took a while to determine what that timing looked like and felt like. “The whole idea behind emoji reactions is to foster a feeling of connection,” Carolien says. “And we found that if the timing was off, the whole feeling of connectedness fell away.” This research helped the design team settle on a timing that felt human instead of mechanic.

Nice place.

“We wanted emoji reactions to be expressive and convey emotions, and at the same time, not feel like they’re taking over the call and distracting from the meeting,” Carolien explains. The team tested how people reacted not only to the emoji popping up in their meetings, but also to things like where the feature was placed inside Meet calls. “We wanted to make sure it was easy for people to find and allow them to get to it quickly — so no one misses the moment!” In one iteration, Carolien says, the emoji bar was too close to the end call button. “We obviously didn’t want someone to go send an emoji and hang up on their call, so we ended up moving it.”

The pros of pros and cons.

While Carolien has been a UX researcher for more than 15 years, even she can be surprised by what testing can reveal — case in point, what her team found out about including so-called “negative” emoji reactions. “Initially we only had ‘positive’ emoji — like a smiley or a thumbs-up,” she says. “But then we tested it more and we found that people sometimes need to use a ‘negative’ emoji — like a thumbs-down — to convey something.”

For example, if someone in a call is describing a tough situation they’re going through, a thumbs-up or smiley emoji might be seen as sarcastic, while a face with open mouth emoji ? could be seen as sympathetic to someone’s struggles. Carolien and her team also found that positive emoji (like a thumbs up, or a heart) are used more frequently than negative emoji (a thumbs down), so they intentionally grouped the positive emoji in a way that makes them easy to get to, since people tend to use them more to show support or share kudos.

Emoji reactions in Meet are just part of the latest Google Workplace updates — in the coming weeks, Meet will be available directly in Docs, Sheets and Slides to facilitate collaborative working sessions, and inline threading in Spaces will help keep conversations organized and contextual. Be sure to check out the Google Cloud blog for everything that’s new and coming soon.

As we explored in a recent global survey we commissioned from Economist Impact, employees around the world are looking for new ways of working and connecting with each other and their organizations as remote and hybrid work models continue to evolve. Creating a blueprint for more inclusive and collaborative meetings can help teams feel more connected—wherever and however they work together.

Scheduling meetings

If you work with people in other time zones, then you know scheduling can be a logistical headache. At Google, we follow a few guidelines to optimize participation.

Share information for better scheduling: Encourage your team to add working hours, location and focus time into Calendars.

Only invite those who can contribute: If you aren’t sure, invite less meeting-essential teammates as “optional.”

Choose dates and times that work for more people: For teams in distant time zones,add other timezones to your calendar to schedule global meetings well in advance and discuss alternating host time zones for regular calls.

Add an agenda to the Calendar invite: Let people know at least 24 hours in advance what a meeting will be about — for example: “This meeting will be successful if we leave with four great ideas from the brainstorming session” — so participants can prepare. And don’t forget you can schedule send the agenda to arrive right before the meeting or at the correct time for different timezone attendees.

Encourage RSVPing with location: Have attendees share whether they will attend “in a meeting room” or if they are “joining virtually” so everyone, including the organizer, knows what to expect.

Rotate facilitator and note-taker roles: Having team members alternate roles lessens the burden on one person and gives everyone a chance to participate more fully.

Prep with Spaces

Spaces is Google Workspace’s central place for team collaboration. It works closely with tools like Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive and Meet so coworkers can digitally work on projects, share ideas and even connect on a personal level better. Participants can prepare for meetings by reviewing documents and presentations side-by-side and collaborate with questions and suggestions, with everything saved in Spaces for future reference.

During the meeting

Good hybrid meetings shouldn’t feel like two different conversations that happen in the room and remotely. To keep them feeling like a single inclusive experience, try the following:

Help virtual team members connect: Acknowledge when remote teammates join and use the first five minutes to connect. Some Google teams start by asking questions like “what was the best thing you ate this weekend?” or playing interesting YouTube videos.

Keep and share meeting notes: Notetakers can use a pre-populated notes Doc in the Calendar invite or even meeting recordings to share what happened with attendees and anyone who couldn’t attend.

Collaborate with Companion mode: Google Meet’s Companion mode can help everyone participate, no matter where they are. For people in the conference room, Companion mode turns off the video and audio on laptops so participants can use functions like chat, screen sharing, hand-raising, polls, host controls and more, while avoiding feedback with the conference room hardware. Additionally, team members can also enable captions and translations in their preferred language and view presentations up-close on their own device.

Foster inclusivity: Facilitators can make sure everyone feels heard by encouraging remote contributions, avoiding “in the room” side conversations and reminding mixed language teams to use translated captions.

Provide multiple ways to give feedback: Not everyone is comfortable speaking in a meeting, so make sure people know they can use the chat option, or try using the poll feature to engage everyone in offering input.

Use virtual rather than physical whiteboards: With Jamboard or the Jamboard app, remote attendees can also view and contribute.

After the meeting

Many of us have experienced meeting fatigue as our teams became more distributed during the last two years. But it’s always crucial to make sure attendees feel like their time is well spent, and there are a few ways you can do that. For starters, try sending a follow-up note thanking attendees for coming, asking for feedback and sharing any notes, recordings, action items, and decisions. You can also post meeting assets to the relevant Spaces so absent team members can contribute. It’s also a good idea to gather general feedback for recurring meetings — try polling people once a quarter using Google Forms, possibly anonymously — about how the meeting could be made more productive and inclusive.

Discover more tips and best practices

As hybrid meetings become the norm for millions of people, discovering and encouraging best practices that make meetings more inclusive is an essential part of the evolving future of work.

Discover more hybrid work tips and best practices on our future of work site.