UX Case Study: Zoom Story Share Feature
My Role: UX Researcher, Designer | Duration: 5 Days
Overview (Executive Summary + Takeaways)
We came in with the assumption that individuals are finding remote communications lacking in comparison to physical “in-person” communication. With this primarily stemming from the lack of expressions users have on these platforms.
We used user interviews to help us find insights on whether or not this was true. Our hypothesis was later invalidated when we discovered that in fact users find expressing themselves over remote apps easy. A new problem statement was born: How might we ease the burden and fatigue associated with the use of multiple avenues (apps) to facilitate communication?
Our research led us to propose a feature allowing users to schedule and share meetings to their social media stories utilizing the Zoom mobile app.
Overall, users found the feature easy to navigate to (with constant iterations along the way), and have been found to think they might employ the feature if available.
Initial Hypothesis: “Individuals are finding it difficult to stay engaged while using remote apps to communicate because of a lack of expression offered.”
Research Method: We interviewed 5 people, starting off with general questions about their app usage all the way to more specific questions concerning how they felt using apps, and any negative or positive situations they had.
Affinity Mapping + Insights
After affinity mapping our research notes, we came up with 3 major insights from our users:
1: Users use a plethora of apps to facilitate communication (both professional and personal), often leading to frustration.
2. Users often mirror behaviors from the real-world to stay engaged. Such as raising their hands, putting away their phone, etc.
3. Users across the board found connectivity issues to be a barrier to their remote communications.
We later invalidated our hypothesis. We found out that many users did not find it hard to communicated and express themselves through remote communication apps.
Persona:
Revised problem statement:
Remote communication is facilitated amongst a plethora of applications, that might at times be redundant and overwhelming to users.
Remote Rachael finds this complicated, and overwhelming,
How might we help reduce the amount of “avenues” users use to facilitate their personal and business communications.
After formulating our revised problem statement, we got to work on how this would come together within the most used application amongst our interviewed users — Zoom
The feature we landed on was a “share feature”. This would allow users to leverage their existing avenues of communication, and consolidate it to one application — Zoom — to ease the burden of having to use 2+ apps to communicate.
We started sketching:
We decided to place our feature within the “New Meeting” tab of Zoom. From there our user would be able to toggle on-or-off the share to story feature, and set when the meeting will be.
From there they would select any connected social media and post to their stories.
We then ran usability tests with a lo-fi paper version made interactive through Figma.
After running the usability tests, we determined that we had enough positive stats to encourage us to continue with the feature.
What’s Next?
We need to work on how to make the share-to-story feature more noticeable. Users had hesitation selecting it at first, with the toggle on-or-off not being noticeable to users at first. We will test out a button feature instead next round of usability testing, and see if that leads to a decrease of misclicks.
