Getting around to having fun, collaborative meetings, and connecting with our team ❤️

Using the cat GIF in the Around interface

You might be fed up with virtual meetings after a year of working from home. ‘Zoom fatigue’ became very real for our team at the end of 2020. We started to dread remote meetings, adhering to Zoom etiquette and the almost sterile-like environment. The enjoyment of collaborating on a call and connecting on a personal level which makes work fun was starting to vanish.

Let’s be real, virtual meetings can be liberating, but by Spring 2021 they started to suck and we could feel the energy going down. Having a distributed team across multiple time zones, we needed to find a new solution to help us bring the joy back into our design meetings and make them fun, engaging, and productive.

And through an almost serendipitous series of events, we were introduced to Around at a time when we needed to find a new, innovative way to communicate and connect with our team.

Around design and interface

As a team full of designers and creatives, we immediately noticed the vibrant yet calming branding and colors of Around. The app has a beautiful design and we appreciated the minimal interface and well-thought-out user experience.

It felt like an exciting game to try out all of the intriguing features. It’s a brand new experience for video conference software. Once you give it a try you will notice how Around has introduced a new way of thinking for video calls.

The best way to describe Around is a breath of fresh air that has power boosted our meetings and sprinkled in fun elements!

If you’re like our team and have little ones at home, you know how tricky it is to navigate virtual calls while trying to make sure your kids don’t disturb your coworkers or productivity flow. Although it’s cute to have your toddler pop into a call, it can be distracting having them crawl around in your camera view. Or as simple as constantly feeling the pressure to clean or position your computer at weird angles where you cannot see your kitchen or bedroom in the back, especially if you’re living in a small studio in NYC, for example.

This is where Around’s floating, cropped circles have made a big difference. Their technology zooms in to focus on your face and removes all the unnecessary noise in your background that can be distracting. And if you’re not a fan of seeing your face on the screen, you can use “Hide self-view” which is a favorite for our team. It is unnatural to look at yourself while in a meeting and can be anxiety-inducing. This is a form of mental health wellness for us and we’re grateful for this feature.

The color filters are cool. They are fun, help break the ice, especially when having new team members join and significantly help with video fatigue.

Constantly chasing your video window is a thing of the past. You heard that right! 🎉

Floating Mode allows for each person’s video avatar to stay on top as you navigate between screens. This is where we think this is an amazing tool for designers as it allows our team to better collaborate during a meeting. We can stay discreetly on top of our Sketch file and as one of us shares their screen to review a design and get feedback you can see your teammates or clients right there and then and get their first impressions.

Example of Floating Mode in Around video call while using Sketch

We use the emojis and GIFs that display over our circles to quickly amplify our emotions. It might get old over time, but at this moment we like this interaction especially during Campfire Mode 🔥.

The Around experience reminds us of a service we used to listen to music as a team. We loved the now shutdown virtual DJ Turntable.fm — a service that just like Campfire Mode allowed us to get together but play music. It’s on our wishlist that perhaps Around might introduce a DJ mode in the future 🤞.

One of our favorite features is the Notes Mode. It saves us time and effort. Previously we would have to have a Google Doc or a Notion Document open to take synchronous notes and make sure we’re all on the same page on feedback and action items during the meeting. This extra step and window always took away from the experience. The best part is that once the meeting is done the notes are emailed to all participants automatically, and voilá!

Example of Notes email received after an Around call has ended

As more and more teams move into a more hybrid-remote work environment, the EchoTerminator feature will come in handy. It will automatically detect and sync people’s mics if in the same room and eliminate any time and focus lost trying to figure out how to remove unwanted echos, feedback, and muting mics. This feature will no doubt create a more equal and inclusive experience for everyone, whether remote or in-office.

There are many more features like great integrations, sharing capabilities, customizable preferences, and the security and privacy-centric vision that we like and use in our daily calls.

Best of all, Around is currently in public beta and free for everyone to try out. As creatives, we think this is a great tool to have in your daily toolbox that will reinvent and improve your work and will make connecting with others more fun and less stressful.

Give Around a try (you’ll thank us later)!