Meeting Cost: Making Time Visible
Meeting Cost is a Microsoft Teams extension designed to uncover the hidden financial impact of daily meetings. It helps organizations visualize real-time costs, reduce unnecessary meetings, and drive smarter, more mindful collaboration.
Understanding the Challenge
In today’s hybrid work environment, meetings have become constant often consuming more time than productive work. Research showed that employees spend nearly 18 hours per week in meetings, and 30% of them add little or no value.
Companies were losing millions annually to poorly structured discussions. Despite tools for scheduling, there was no way to understand the cost behind every minute spent. This insight gap inspired the idea: a simple, transparent way to quantify meeting expenses.
Designing with Purpose
Our goal was to make meeting costs visible without disrupting the flow of work. We envisioned a lightweight Teams extension that could calculate real-time costs, summarize meeting history, and nudge teams toward conscious collaboration.
The design direction focused on clarity, minimalism, and context-awareness integrating smoothly into Teams’ existing interface while offering immediate insights through chat notifications, popups, and dashboards.
Building the Experience
We mapped the user journey across pre-meeting, live, and post-meeting stages:
Pre-meeting: Chatbot shares summaries with estimated costs.
During meeting: Popups invite users to disclose salary ranges for accuracy.
Post-meeting: Detailed analytics visualize participation, total cost, and trends.
Accessibility, speed, and automation were key. We built micro-interactions that keep users informed without adding friction turning cost awareness into a subtle, everyday habit.
Measuring the Impact
Once deployed to beta users, the change was measurable. Organizations reported:
39% fewer unnecessary meetings
27% increase in productive work hours
22% improvement in cost-awareness
By simply visualizing meeting costs, teams naturally began questioning whether a meeting was worth it leading to better focus and intentional communication across departments.
Key Learnings
Designing Meeting Cost taught us that behavioral change doesn’t need complexity it needs visibility. When people understand the value of their time, they make better decisions.
The project reinforced the importance of data transparency, habit design, and invisible UX where design quietly influences choices without demanding attention.
