Zoom — Design Critique from usability and experience perspectives
How zoom became so popular and what they can do to become better?
While millions of people being forced to stay at home during the COVID pandemic in order to stop the spread of the virus, there are some services getting the chance to closely associate with people’s daily life and help people stay positive and creative at home. That’s why we decide to talk about more about Zoom today. As one of the dozens of video conferencing services, it has risen to the top and we are wondering how zoom became so popular during social distancing. From user experience and product thinking perspectives, we want to analyze not only its eye-catching design ideas and features but also some potential users’ unmet needs on the platform.
✅ Design the experiences to meet usability standards
To start with, there are some unique features that make Zoom successful and stand out from the competitors. We evaluated these features based on the usability heuristics, a powerful guideline used by designers to define the good and compelling experience. Zoom did well in designing the experiences to meet the standards and you will then understand why Zoom becomes popular in the competitive market.
Leverage familiarity with real-world activities
As an online video conference application, Zoom is trying to create and stimulate the real conference and classroom environment in order to better serve workers and students’ needs. “Reaction” tab gives users the functionality to claps remotely for the presenter.
Moreover, imagining we are in an educational setting, students can be super familiar with “Yes” and “No” voting feature within the participation tab since it simply represents how they raise hands to vote or ask questions in class. The design stimulates in-class activities and therefore increases students’ online engagement. As this heuristic mentioned, using the components and design that are familiar to users can make the interaction intuitive and product successful.
Make the design accessible and improve the efficiency
Join the meeting by simply clicking the link without log in.
Without complex signing in process or additional steps, users can enjoy the video conference experience anywhere and anytime only with the zoom link. It has become a huge advantage of Zoom and largely increases its user bases at the initial state since the interaction and setting are friendly to new users and can encourage them to further download the application. This feature makes the product accessible not only for novice users and but also for experienced users, therefore, increase the efficiency of having the meeting on the platform.
Make system status visible and clear
As mentioned by another usability heuristics, a good usability and experience design should always let users be aware of the status of the system and deliver the right amount of information. Two small interaction designs will be mentioned here. First of all, when there are lots of people attend the meeting and you were trying to find out who was speaking in the gallery view, you can always tell by checking on whose window has the yellow outline and avoid users’ confusion and stay focused.
In addition, there are some raising concerns about the security and privacy issues recently, therefore, Zoom puts lots of efforts to better deal with users’ privacy and keeps releasing new updates. Whenever the host wants to record the zoom meeting, users will hear that the system says “This meeting is being recorded” and they can easily be notified the facts of recording. Users can also refer back to the recording button showing on the top left corner and check the status.
Help users recognize the potential errors and recover
Did you meet the situation that someone was talking while forgot to unmute himself/herself? How does Zoom help with that? A small window will be promoted to you and tell you that “You are muted now.” This is also an important usability heuristic and Zoom does a great job to help users recognize the error and suggest the way to recover.
❗️Discover unmet needs from major flows’ analysis
Moving away from what Zoom accomplished, we also found several unmet user needs from in-depth analyzing the main flows. Although Zoom cooperates with lots of business clients as a whole, such as educational institutions, companies and NGO organizations, the core of the product is trying to attract and serve their end customers with the best functionalities and user experience. We believe that Zoom can further shape its product and features around users.
№1. Join a meeting
Users struggle a lot with finding the previous zoom meeting they attended.
After everything moves to online during the COVID outbreak, people begin using Zoom to host daily/weekly meeting or take scheduled online courses. It is a common case that people need to constantly access a series of zoom meetings where they always hold the same zoom link and ID. However, it is not obvious to users about how to quickly access the previous meeting Zoom room and people ended up with keep asking others to send the link before the meeting starts. Only if you are experienced user and you noticed the trick, you can get a limited list of the previous meetings by clicking the “Join” button on the homepage and selecting the dropdown arrow on the side.
However, as I mentioned, users can only see up to 10 history records and they cannot store and save all of the important links in one place. As an urgent need from the user’s side, Zoom should be aware of this pain point and redesign this functionality in the near future.
№2. Schedule a meeting
Users can only see meetings that are scheduled by themselves but not the ones scheduled by others.
After the previous updates, Zoom’s UI elements become more consistent and clear. Zoom is trying to emphasize the functions on the landing dashboard. Especially for the scheduling aspect, Zoom leaves the right section of Home page to show upcoming events and wants to tight meeting and scheduling/management features all-in-one-place. Just like what Zoom promotes, the primary purpose of users to schedule meetings with Zoom is to help them easily determine the upcoming events and quickly access the meeting.
However, besides the meeting scheduled by themselves, users end up with attending meetings scheduled by other hosts frequently in most cases. Currently, Zoom only showcases the events scheduled by users and does not include others’ meeting invitations. This fact largely decreases the user experience of the homepage and affect user satisfaction. To meet the needs of users, Zoom should think about how to improve the scheduling experience and clearly showcase the Zoom meetings on the platform.
⚡️Go beyond
As an online meeting product, Zoom also can think about
- How to engage the audience more and encourage the interactions during the panel discussion and Q&A session?
- How to increase meeting efficiency, for example, including meeting agenda or clearly showing the meeting time and length to increase the audience’s awareness?
- How to provide a more inclusive and pleasant meeting environment to shorten the physical distance online, such as incorporating entertainments and giving audiences the control to create multiple channels, etc.
Undoubtedly, Zoom has combined lots of user-centric and useful meeting features and become the winner in the field of video conference application during the social distancing. However, there are still spaces for Zoom to continuously grow and improve under this competitive market. Moving forward, we can evaluate the product from other perspectives and explore more hidden features. We are able to determine more successful metrics and give useful suggestions for the next move.
Next episode: Uber Eat
As you might notice, people’s eating habits changed a lot during the COVID outbreak and lots of people begin using food delivering services, such as Uber Eat and DoorDash, etc. We will explore the user flows on the Uber Eat platform and talk about the intentions and thoughts behind the product and design.
See you there 🤓!
