Introduction:
Over the past 3 weeks, I have been working on improving my UX/UI skills through a course with Radify labs. The focus for this week was a group project. We were tasked with choosing an app with a problem and redesigning it. I worked in a team of three in order to improve the Zoom desktop app.
The Coronavirus pandemic changed the way friends and family are staying in touch with each other. Since people can’t hang out in person, many have turned to video platforms to keep up to date with friends and family. Many people are using Zoom to participate in group calls with friends and family members. However, in our experience, some technologically inexperienced participants have difficulty using the platform. This brought us to the question: how might Zoom’s desktop app become more user friendly for the social users?
Process/Research:
To start figuring out how to improve Zoom’s design for social users, we conducted three user interviews.
To start, I interviewed a teacher who uses Zoom for social calls. She started using Zoom at the beginning of the pandemic in order to stay in touch with her friends. She likes that you don’t have to have an account to use Zoom, and she prefers to use the desktop version so that she can see more people. In her opinion, Zoom is easy to learn on your own. A pain point for her friends new to the platform is figuring out how to turn the camera on at the start of a call. She also wishes there was an easier way to add new users onto a call. Additionally, she uses the free version of the platform and would like a 5 minute warning before her 40 free minutes are up. Overall, she loves using Zoom to stay connected and would recommend it to her friends.
Yewon interviewed a friend that was using Zoom for both work and for school. He mentioned that as he was familiarizing himself with the platform (at the beginning of the pandemic), he quickly adapted to the different features and tools presented on the desktop version of Zoom. One pain point for him is the difficulty of switching between the desktop and mobile version of the app. Sometimes when his phone runs out of battery, or vice versa, he likes to switch it to the other device. In order to do so, you must copy the link or the meeting code in order to transfer the screen from one to the next. He wished that it was an easier transfer of screens. Overall, he finds Zoom easy to use, but he thinks the platform could use some work in terms of improving efficiency and usability for all users. Additionally, he mentioned that the menu bars could be revised and simplified in order to reduce the look of it being cluttered.
Finally, Quinn interviewed his mom. She is an average technology user, and can get easily frustrated when using new applications or sites that don’t have obvious solutions or uses. She has used Zoom before, but for work uses Google and Blackboard for online meetings. Quinn conducted a task-based interview, while asking her relevant questions based on her perception of difficulty in completing the tasks. She completed the majority of the basic tasks with ease, which included situations a casual user would want to be able to accomplish such as: starting a call, inviting an outside party to the call, muting the microphone, changing to gallery view to see all participants, joining another call, sharing her screen, and participating the chat. She struggled with changing the background and specific settings of the calls. While changing the background was not important for her, she said that finding the setting menu was difficult and very inconvenient. She has no preference over Blackboard, Google or Zoom. She uses the other two for work and would most likely use Zoom for social use because most friends and family use it. Her major complaint was the lack of a settings button. Overall, she agreed that Zoom was easy to figure out with some time put in to explore.
After discussing these user interviews as a team, we came up with some changes that we could make to the zoom platform in order to simplify and improve the design for social users.
Redesign:
In this section, I have paired the original Zoom screen with the redesigned Zoom screen and explained why we made the changes we made.
We redesigned the initial zoom login screen to be more colorful and inviting. We changed the text from join a meeting to join call in order to encourage a more social feeling to the interface. We also added the text “Welcome back!” to provide a more welcoming experience for the user.
The original second screen right before you log on to a call has a lot of additional information that a social user doesn’t need.
We simplified the second screen on zoom by adding a profile picture and removing all the extra information not relevant to the social user. We added clear start microphone and start camera buttons so that the user can easily choose if they want their camera or microphone on before they join the call. We further simplified this screen by adding a large, blue join call button in order to make joining the call super simple and clear to the user.
The original Zoom call screen has a lot of additional buttons the social user doesn’t need, and the leave meeting button is hard to find.
On the redesigned call screen, we took out the icons for reactions, participants, and record at the bottom of the bar as they are typically not needed in social situations. We added a settings button to allow users to easily access all the Zoom call setting in one place. Additionally, we changed the chat box to make direct messaging clearer. There is a search button that allows the user to search for the person they want to direct message, and individual chats are separated by a button. This makes it easier to switch between chatting different people and helps to separate the messages by having them under different tabs instead of all under the same chat. In order to make leave meeting button easier to find, we choose to make it a larger red button with white text in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. We also changed the text from leave meeting to end call. Additionally, we changed the stop video button to a red button that says stop camera. When the user’s camera is stopped, this button would change to green and say start camera like on the redesigned second screen shown above. This makes starting and stopping the camera even clearer and more obvious. The bars on the top and bottom of the screen were colored blue in order to make the screen more visually appealing and go with the social theme of the redesign.
Conclusion:
Overall, these changes support inexperienced social users looking for a simple way to stay connected to friends or family over Zoom. We simplified the interface by removing unnecessary information and making the important buttons clear. We also added more color to the different screens to create a more welcoming environment for the user. This redesign of the Zoom desktop app creates a simplified and welcoming space for users to stay connected with friends and family.
