The Importance of Standards in Designing Meeting Spaces with Greg Jeffreys

Greg Jeffreys, co-owner at Visual Displays is back for a second podcast with Tom Arbuthnot, to discuss a holistic approach to room design. 

• The role of user experience in room design
• The importance of standards in designing meeting spaces to maintain the quality and repeatability of the design process
• Considering room attributes including lighting and acoustics
• Performance standards as a guideline to achieve quality and consistent results
• Current and future trends in room design including multi-camera setups and spatial audio

Thanks to Jabra, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support of the community.

Transcript

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Tom 0:00

Welcome back to the team's insider podcast. This week we've got Greg Jeffries back for another show. Really appreciate his deep insights on room design. We get beyond just the technical choices, but also into lighting, acoustics, measuring performance, and how to develop those best practice standards. Really great insights from Greg. Thanks to him. And also many thanks to Jabra, who are this week's podcast sponsor. Really appreciate their support of everything we're doing at Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the pod. You may have already heard we've had a Greg on as a guest before, and we had so much to talk about before that recording and after that recording, I wanted to get him back relatively quickly. Today we're going to get into kind of, I don't know, Greg, you can explain it, but an approach to rooms, more of a holistic approach. So I spend a lot of my time talking about the kit the feeds, the speeds, but what I love talking to you about the kind of the bigger conversation. So for those who didn't hear the last show, could you just introduce

Greg 0:58

Sure. So I'm Greg Jeffries. I wear sort of three hats, really. I'm a co owner at Visual Displays. I'm the managing consultant at Greg Jeffries consulting. I consult on the kind of things that we're talking about. And I'm also heavily involved in the leadership of standards. I've until recently I was the the chair of the AVIXA standards committee, and I've led or co written a number of the the standards that, that we have, and some of the, some of which we might talk about.

Tom 1:22

Awesome. So where's the best place to start in this? Cause again, like often I see the conversation start from kit up, but I know you, you think about it more holistically, so how do you

Greg 1:35

I think I see the thing as a as a bit of a Venn diagram, really. The technology of course is absolutely essential, but the reality is that the technology can't do miracles. If it's got a very poor, poorly designed room, a room with poor lighting poor acoustics, then the the technology is struggling to give its best result. And so the point about the kind of work that I do is helping people so that they have spaces where the technology has the chance to really sing and do its stuff. rather than fighting an uphill battle. So that's the kind of the background to it. Yeah.

Tom 2:11

Is it fair to say, I feel like. body of knowledge has got I don't know, worse is the right phrase, but like Rooms has now spread between, you used to have specialists and it was AV and like they owned it, and now increasingly, rooms is a IT AV hybrid conversation, or maybe even IT are doing the smaller Rooms. I come from the IT space, not the AV space, but I certainly I've seen projects where IT have whacked a bar on a wall and they're done and it was. wholly inappropriate for the space or the layout

Greg 2:43

I think there are a few factors which, we need to be up front about that, that have caused that situation. I think one, is effectively what you've just said is that, we're all technology nerds in one form or another, and we all like to think. that it's all about the technology, when it isn't. Secondly the drive to hybrid that happened as the pandemic meant that there was a, the AV industry did an incredible job. to to convert the world to becoming to convert meeting spaces and teaching spaces to being hybrid. And it was just about getting the damn thing working and people did an incredible job. It might not have been pretty, but it did work. And I think the, the AV UC guys that did a, did an incredible job and there's no criticism there. However. That did mean that the bar had been set low for what might be considered good enough for for a hybrid space. And of course, the other trend, of course, is the commoditization of it of it all Michelle at, Microsoft, I was co presenting with him a couple of weeks back, and he was saying that Microsoft's research shows that only 5 percent of meeting rooms are equipped. So there's a massive, you can see there's a massive demand, but also you can see that where it will go will be much more of a volume based, commodity based thing. So those are the background factors to, to why we're, why we're at where we are now.

Tom 4:00

Yeah. And how do customers begin to bridge this gap? Because obviously if it is a volume move, which it feels like it is at the moment and customers aren't going to spend, five days consulting time with someone on you per room. Is it, are there some sort of simple steps or frameworks or considerations? Is it different for different scenarios? What's your

Greg 4:22

Oh, that's you go straight to the heart of the thing there.

Tom 4:27

I like to do that

Greg 4:27

I think a lot of the people who would be interested in what we're talking about will be working for large organizations, enterprise level deployments campuses and the concept that you don't use standards. in that it's a weird thing, but it is actually overall what we're seeing. And so the answer is if you're not using an AVIXA standard, or, a WELL standard, or, a City standard, what standard are you using? And usually, that's an answer that involves listening to tumbleweed going down the street. So it is essential to have standards, and it doesn't matter how much or how little you're prepared to spend on the spaces, there are still standards that, that are there. And of course, if you get the room right, then you don't need to spend so much on the technology anyway. And so that they're, that, that's the kind of background to it. I think that the kind of work that I do is typically relatively short and sweet. I've got, a lot of ongoing engagements with customers, but this isn't rocket science and it just needs an approach, understanding what the standards are, using them really critically and having just an ongoing way that you can do it.

Tom 5:33

It's nice to hear an expert say that because usually it's the other way around, usually they're like, oh, it's super complicated, and you need to have me for weeks and weeks cause this is

Greg 5:40

That, reminds me Tom of a audio consultant. I know very successful. I'm going to name no names. and he always said that if he had a client that really pissed him off, he would say to the client, what you've got to understand is that we're really slow and really expensive. But but I've never been it. I've never had the bottle or the aggression or the passive aggression to ever get to that point.

Tom 6:04

I I like to start with the expensive because that sets expectations. Not sure about slow, I've never said that. So where like you say, this audience for the pod is mostly enterprise. You just reeled off two standards there that I've heard you say before, but I don't know about them to be honest. So where do

Greg 6:21

Okay. What you want, the problem with a meeting space, a team's room, whatever it is, it's it's a great tangled knot of things. and you really need to have a have an organized approach. so what you're looking for heuristic, so it's a way or methodologies that where you can approach the approach the thing in a simplified form. And the way that we do it. In the consultancy is that we use this disaggregation thing. So that's just basically a fancy way that we break it down into all its component elements, the lighting, the acoustics, the audio, the display, furniture, break it all down and and then have an approach for all of those. And that works whether you're looking at upgrading existing space, creating new spaces or troubleshooting. It's an approach that works overall. And you couple that with the, with either a either a specific or a kind of a general. Theme of marginal gains theory. And that is to say that for each of those elements, you look to say how could we make, a small, but significant percentile increase in quality or whatever, in all of those things. and it's taking that approach. So that's the kind of the headline of it, but that's how we work.

Tom 7:33

I love that because obviously, again, coming from more of the IT vendor space, it's a lot of how many rooms, what's your budget? Okay. The kit is that number of rooms divided by budget, but actually maybe you could make more of an impact on your organization by improving the furniture, adding sound, dampening, lighting, whatever it may be. It might not just be

Greg 7:52

If you look at the if you look at the room in what you might call a phenomenological way, we just look at the room, like you were someone landing from Mars and look to the, at a meeting room, you'd go how come they've spent like 10 grand on the table? And and then two grand on the, or or a grand on the kit. And so the way that we're The budget within a room is actually deployed is what, one thing but, I think another one of the new standards actually that we've got coming out in AVIXA one that I'm co writing when I'm working on is the, user experience design for AV. And my good friend Adam Banks runs, he used to run the UX at Google in the UK, and he's now got a, another business UX Study that makes lab equipment for UX labs. He makes the point that the one thing that people never, ever do is actually talk to the users. The people who, generate the brief other stakeholders this is not to say that they are ignorant and they don't know what they're talking about, but one thing that never happens is basically using the principles of human centered design, user centered design and find out what people actually want. Because when you use that kind of approach, what you do is to distinguish between, got to be very careful to distinguish between what people, say that they want. And what people actually need, The cliche is there before the iPhone came out, nobody knew that they wanted it. however, there was just, squillions of dollars of UX research that went into that. and lo and behold, ah, I've seen that now I want it, so it's that kind of balance and that kind of approach. And the other thing I'd add to that, sorry, Tom, I'm talking across to you, the other thing I'd add to that is that the the point of saying that is that if you really do look at what, the true user needs are, it might well be that all you need in that, in a particular room is a bloody. whiteboard flip chart and a webcam, it might be that you do not need the fancy expensive interactive whiteboard and so on. That's a fairly exaggerated case, but I have, literally come across cases where that would have been the best solution. So if you take that approach.

Tom 9:59

Yeah. I think we've, I'm sure we've all seen over kitted rooms, it's a regional office, it's barely used, but they made one room insanely high end. And there's three other rooms that don't have any kit. And actually, if you divided that budget by four, it would be way more practical for the use cases. But we wanted a fancy room

Greg 10:15

No, I think the C suite, the kind of the senior management level are really very important in this because, whatever the limited budget might be these people generally miraculously manage to discover a bit of budget to make their own spaces heaven on earth. But it isn't just a question of chucking money at it. It is a question of actually thinking about what the needs are. One of the big culprits here is is people categorizing rooms by small, medium, or large, for example, which is great for the commoditization of things. but the room size, it's an attribute, it's not a classification, it's an attribute about the room. What you actually want to know. in the room is, what are the workflows and functions you need to support? Are you gonna pre present? Are you gonna collaborate? Are you gonna teach? You know what's the actual use cases are there? That's the way that you classify spaces, and that's a bit of a foreign concept to a lot of people.

Tom 11:07

So does that make, do you end up potentially with a matrix there of your use cases and your sizes? Cause the size probably plays a factor in the decision, but that's a really good point of a small teaching room is very

Greg 11:19

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, the size of the room is very important but it is an attribute but nevertheless, for example, a camera bar the mic will only reach X meters, and one of the reasons that, that the people stretch the envelope is because it's not to say when you get to whatever the stated number of meters is at nine, when you get to 10 meters, you can't hear it because you can, but you've just got that drop off of quality. And if you like, it's those sorts of things that you need to be on top of.

Tom 11:49

Yeah. Yeah. That's the use case. I, again, that was sure we both seen a lot is bars being pushed way beyond their spec. And like you see it potentially even more so without with the cameras getting higher megapixels and smarter framing, so maybe you can have an okay picture of that distance, but is your audio going to be

Greg 12:08

I refer the honourable member to the earlier part of the conversation because this is all, all about that kind of use case thing, and it really is important to get those things right.

Tom 12:18

Awesome. Pivoting a little bit. I'd be interested to see what are you seeing in the market at the moment? Obviously the back to the office, not back to the office, the how rooms are being used has changed. Where are you seeing the organizations you're working with and aware of? Where are they placing their budget in terms of what they're doing? Are they doing? Big, I'm hearing a lot about experiences and experience spaces at the moment. Obviously there's a lot of talk about equipping all those small rooms. Microsoft definitely want to see all the rooms have a Teams Room license, right? That's their objective. So where are you seeing the real

Greg 12:48

I typically honestly, Tom there's, in, in the people I work with, it's very hard to talk about typical things, but I think the particular trends. What you were talking about is this, Microsoft's push into the sub 1000 dollar category, where you can get a room out for not very much. But I think that for the most part the work that I do would either be in specialist spaces or in medium and larger spaces. But again, what we're seeing at the moment is, people trying to push the envelope too much, and also, it's like this standing wave of what, of this technology that's just there, or always just out of. In terms of the trends, in a way you could also say what am I going to go and particularly look at ISE in a couple of weeks time? Frighteningly close to us now. But, the two things I will particularly be looking at will be multi camera setups and spatial audio because when it comes to the experiential side of things, then those are, I think the two key items and. I you're going to hear me or, read me riffing on about this. But, the laws of physics they are laws of physics, they're not the guidance of physics and, microphones can only do a certain thing and and so can speakers and so can cameras. And I think that, rather than deal with the basic issue of having one really well specified, really well positioned camera with the room layout people think, okay we'll just put some more cameras in and that will sort us out that, I think that honestly, I think that it'll be a kind of a score draw. I think it'll be, two steps forward and two steps backwards in some ways, because you've got all this complexity you're going to be adding in latency delays into, lag into it all. And yeah, but it will nevertheless offer something new, but, we're going to be seeing sides of people's faces, views in their ears and so forth, and it's, it'll be interesting to see. I think the thing that does concern me about this is that the thing about a hybrid setup is that it's something we've become habituated to. And what I see it now with terms of spatial audio and in terms of the the multi cameras is that things are actually diverging before they're going to coalesce, because we're going to see different sorts of experiences from these multi cameras set up.

Tom 15:13

Yeah, I'm quite excited about that because the different experiences thing, like you say, Logitech have got their center of room, neat have got their center of room, Crestron have got the outside in with Automate VX, I think it is, and it's interesting because they're all going to have different takes on not just the kit, but how they deal with those different feeds, like you say that ear cam, that how they deal with the cutting, are they going to, Cisco have been talking a lot about their kind of AI direction as well. There'll be a real differentiator beyond just megapixels and feed as in how they deal with things.

Greg 15:48

Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think it's, we're always going to be living in exciting and interesting times in our technology and enable, but always I bring it back to the basics, which are the individual standards that are there. There are building standards that have that apply to the environment, lighting H and V, noise, ambient noise levels, there are AV standards that go across the whole panoply of every aspect of the room. There are standards there, and I think the thing you got to be very careful about is not to scare the horses, because, I've got, It's what it's my gig. I've got access to all of these standards, but they do not, it does not need to be like, taking the tablets of stone. They need to be used very critically and in very simple ways. And really that's a big part of what I do is making it a practical proposition and helping companies to use standards because the thing is that the, if you ask 10 people what a standard is you'll get 10 different answers. and that I think is one of the big things. And the standard, as far as I'm concerned, in the most part is a performance standard. That is to say, is that what you want to do, it's a form of reverse engineering, so you talk to the users, you find out the use case and you find out what the functions are and then define. what a good result should be in terms of, actual measurable, repeatable metrics. Because standards has two meanings, standards refers to a quality of something, and it also, applies to the It's repeatability, standardization, so the kind of the cookie cutter thing. And so the very fact that there's this kind of lack of clarity perhaps I should have been a lawyer because I like to be very clear about the terms of reference when you use words like this.

Tom 17:34

Oh, see, I think lawyers like the opposite so they can really debate it. I whenever I work for a lot with a lawyer, it's always, it depends surely it's either legal or not legal.

Greg 17:42

Depends. I take your pockets are I suppose.

Tom 17:43

Well, yeah, there's always something to debate in the law, that's for sure. Greg, thanks for taking the time. I love getting into this stuff that's not just Kit. And no doubt. I'll

Greg 17:51

Yeah. Looking forward to it

Tom 17:52

level, but for those who want to find out more or get in touch with you

Greg 17:56

if you want to email me, it's Greg at gj consults. co. uk. And I will also be at ISC. Greg Jeffries, J double F R E Y S, look me up on LinkedIn, connect with me and have a conversation, that'd be great. Thanks for having me, Tom. I love talking about this with you. As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about it. So always very glad for the chance to to do the thing. It's really nice to see you.

Tom 18:18

Cheers.