Creativity in the time of Covid-19
Rexmoji: How the lockdown inspired me to build & publish a Chrome extension that makes online work meetings fun
A lot has changed during this year’s pandemic. The world is adapting to this new normal. We have changed the way we eat, sleep, exercise, have fun, socialise, and even work. People are forming new habits while companies are discovering new ways to work productively.
🏢 Rise of the virtual meetings
Full Work from Home has been one of the major changes that nearly every company has been forced to adapt to. At Funding Societies, in Singapore, all of us have been working out of our houses since April. Thankfully, we have technologies available now that allow us to stay connected and collaborate even in this situation. Google Meet, Zoom and, other video conferencing tools are becoming a big part of our everyday lives. Our work meetings have been happening virtually on Google Meet these last three months with close to 150 participants sometimes! 😮 There are many things to like about Meet and I am grateful for its existence but there are also times you wish it did something a little extra that can make our experience of using it a lot more personal.
Consider broadcast meetings — a presentation, a town-hall session, a fireside chat or a sprint demo. The general convention at these meetings is for a small set of speakers to take the stage and share their screen while everyone else is on mute. Depending on the size of the meeting, it is possible that most participants may even have their cameras turned off. As a speaker, you often want to get a sense of your audience’s reaction to a point that you have just made or something that you have just announced. While visual cues help you with this in smaller meetings where everyone has their video on, it gets tricky to get this feedback at a larger broadcast. Let’s consider the scenario of a speaker wanting to run a quick poll — either a small set of participants unmute themselves simultaneously and respond, making it difficult for everyone else to comprehend what is being said OR no one responds assuming someone else will. Neither of these cases is ideal. As a participant, I also find these meetings quite limiting when it comes to reactions. For example, when someone demonstrates an amazing technical achievement at a sprint demo, I want my appreciation for them to be loud and visible — which is difficult to achieve when you are on mute. 😅
As a participant, I also found Google Meet broadcast calls quite limiting when it came to live reactions.
I do remember one such instance. A colleague of mine got promoted 🍻 on a Google Meet call that had over a hundred people. As soon as the announcement was made, people started wishing him. Some voices were heard but many were lost. Add background noise and network issues to the mix and you can imagine the chaos. Some of the more reticent folks like yours truly resorted to using the chat widget to convey our reaction through an emoji (incidentally, this isn’t seamless on Meet as they don’t have an emoji picker) and a personal message. Don’t get me wrong. Our overall excitement for the individual’s milestone was definitely conveyed. At the end of the call however, I thought: “There could be a better way to do this”. 👨🔬
Emojis are great! And we use them on Slack at work all the time. You can punctuate a serious work conversation with cleverly placed emojis to keep the mood light. I have always found them delightful to use and experience in all my text conversations — so, I decided to introduce them to virtual meetings too albeit with some flair sprinkled in. It took me days of planning, iterating and three weekends of coding to come up with the final version that I was ready to share with the world.
🎊 Making virtual meetings fun again
Rexmoji is a simple Google Chrome extension that allows you to post emoji reactions in real-time during a Google Meet or Zoom web meeting. 🙌
So, how does it work? It is quite simple, actually:
- Once you install the extension, a collapsible emoji tray shows up on the left-hand side of your call screen.
- You can tap on any emoji reaction to post it during the call. Tap as many times as you want depending on how strongly you feel the emotion being chosen.
- All posted reactions literally fly into the screens of all participants on the call who also have the extension installed.
Presentation Mode: Sharing your screen over the call? No problem. Tap on the TV icon to collapse the emoji tray.
Full Customisability: You can customise the size of the widget; colour tone of the emojis; and even whether or not you want the sender’s name and avatar to be shown. You can use emojis from any of the presets available or even build your own for your own call needs. The nifty Live Edit button allows you to instantly preview your customisations before saving them.
👨💻 Technology
Rexmoji is written in JavaScript and is made up of a few components:
- Renderer: A VueJS app responsible for all the UI/UX enhancements to the call screen. This includes the emoji tray, its behaviours and the animating emoji reactions. It also listens for events from and sends events to the background page through the Messaging API.
- Background Page: A background page managing communications with the Firebase backend.
- Firebase Realtime Database: A managed service from Google for seamlessly synchronising events between connected clients. The background page is connected to the database and pushes & receives reactions posted in real-time.
- Settings: Similar to the renderer, this is another UI widget that shows all the customisation controls available including the Live Preview functionality.
🎭 Launch & Reception
Although this was a side-project, my teammates at work graciously offered to test-drive my beta application when I told them about it. I still remember the first meeting in our squad we piloted the extension with and the general excitement on that call.
Our team here at Funding Societies | Modalku is always supportive of side-projects. Many folks in the company now have the extension installed and use it actively, which is very encouraging and fulfilling for me personally. Some have even shared great ideas to improve the user experience, which I intend to work on in future versions.
With Rexmoji, I hope that the miscellaneous chatter of online broadcast meetings like “Can you hear me?”, “Yes”, “Okay” and “Hmm” can be replaced by engaging emojis. The next time you want to exit the call, just tap 👋. Want to make a colleague feel great about their work? 👏 as loudly as you can!
Thank you for reading! I hope that you will check out the extension. To install, you can click here or on the Rexmoji icon below. If you install it, let me know what you think in the Responses section. I would love to hear your suggestions to make Rex roar more 😉. And do spread the love by rating the extension on the Chrome web store.
