Zoom Apps — Collaborate
I designed Zoom’s first real-time collaboration product — collaborate mode with multiplayer functionality.
OVERVIEW
Zoom helps meeting participants connect, collaborate, and get more done together with Zoom’s reliable video meeting solution. Zoom App’s Collaborate Mode goes even further and allows all meeting participants to collaborate in real time on documents, whiteboards, presentations, and any other supporting apps without having to leave your Zoom call.
I designed the end-to-end Collaborate experience, including the first-time onboarding flows, the repeat participant experience, active in-meeting controls, and the post-meeting engagement features.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TIMELINE
Q4 2022 – H1 2023 (8 weeks)
OUTCOMES
On track to 30M MRR
+30% MAU baseline
LINKS
Context
Welcome to the Age of Virtual Meetings
Virtual meetings, while convenient, come with their own set of challenges:
Distractions
Opaque engagement & participations
Technical challeenges
Difficulty in collaboration & brainstorming
Inefficient meeting time management
People Problem
There isn’t an existing way to facilitate a simple and easy way to collaborate while leveraging all the Zoom Apps offerings.
Business Goals
Zoom has made it incredibly easy to join meetings (without sign-ins, downloads, etc). As a result, about 37% of users on Windows & Mac are not signed in when joining meetings. These users who are not signed in cannot use Zoom Apps today.
Product Solution
Progressively enhance the app experiences with permissions & authentications regardless of their auth state while facilitating seamless collaboration by providing interactive Collaborate sessions.
The goal of the Collaborate mode for Zoom Apps is to elevate the current screen-sharing model to be interactive from an end-user perspective by leveraging Zoom Apps.
Creative Strategy
I kicked off this project by planning out the project timeline, scope, and confirming our project specs with clear user stories.
Research & Design Project Planning
High-level Project Scope
Project Spec
Research
Snapshot
These are the key findings from my research in a nutshell:
This is what our apps are currently doing to our users:
Confusing, loud, hard to discover the value, who are you and why are you shouting at me?
When it should be more like this:
Welcoming when needed in an orderly fashion and clearly adding value to your meetings
Voice of Our Users
“People want workflow continuity more than having a lot of apps”
7/7 participants shared they find having so many apps feel too busy and intrusive to their meeting experience
User Journey Mapping
Zoom Apps - Flows
“People rely on word of mouth and app brand familiarity over casual browsing”
7/7 participants shared they rarely browse the marketplace unless they are looking for a specific app
User Interview
I discovered our problem space consisted of multiple barriers during 4 major stages of the Zoom Apps experience:
User Persona
Legacy persona prior to my joining heavily relied upon the marketing team’s personas. I found it lacking and out of date, so I’ve refreshed it for my Zoom Apps team with more relevant data & insights.
Zoom Apps - Persona
Based on that knowledge, I defined the research goals and spent a day interviewing 3 power users & 4 casual meeting participants on the following questions:
Why is there a lack of awareness?
What motivated people to use Zoom Apps?
What is preventing people from browsing and using Zoom Apps?
User Journey Mapping
I’ve picked a core user persona and spent the next 2 days moderating a user journey mapping workshop for the product, design, and engineering teams to understand our user's journey. I also wanted to leverage this session as a team bonding opportunity as a bonus.
Zoom Apps Flows
I’ve owned & maintained the entire Zoom Apps user flows and based on the Journey Mapping session findings, I’ve updated the discovery journey diagram with new opportunity areas.
My team & I unearthed multiple opprotunity areas and I’ve documented everything meticulously. Major takeaways:
Summary of Insights
People rely on word of mouth and app brand familiarity over casual browsing
Zoom Apps are just for meetings but people want workflow continuity
Negative prior experiences and advertising deter people from wanting to use Zoom Apps
Collaborate mode: why do I need it? I can just screen share really quickly
“Negative prior experiences and advertising deter people from wanting Zoom Apps”
5/7 participants perceive Zoom Apps as cumbersome and not worth the effort due to previous negative experiences
Creative Solutions
I synthesized the following feature solutions based on my research:
Introduce the Collaborate app as a halo feature and make the experience seamless in multiple contexts of in-meeting, before and after meetings, and for the whiteboard session. I’ve concluded we can’t compete with much quicker & easier screen sharing on a web browser. And we shouldn’t in the first place. The value of the Collaborate feature across Zoom isn’t about single-person sharing, but the ability for a group to edit/share content in real-time. We need to highlight that and put our chips on expanding our value proposition instead of trying to do everything.
Progressive permissions & auth- allows everyone in the meeting to experience any Zoom Apps
Collaborate Feature
I designed the Collaborate feature to enable Zoom App users to instantly collaborate with other meeting participants by seamlessly bringing them together within the same app.
Collaborate Feature
Iteration
During the user testing, I discovered the UX wasn’t instant enough to access & edit an object or document in an app. It’s faster to rely on a web app and screen share.
I also identified the root cause — a meeting has a group of users and their identities, but it’s disconnected from the underlying app’s access control list and permissions mechanism.
Solution
Enable users to share access to an object in an app with permissions (edit/comment/view) and email address as a unique identifier.
Prototype
Tradeoffs
I’ve also weighed the tradeoffs between different permissions entry points and decided on the most contextual stage- right before a collaborate session.
Diagram- Permission Entry
Collaborate Feature Update
What do all these mean? It means Collaborate session access is now more flexible for both meeting hosts & participants. You can easily share in-app documents and apps. You can invite team members intuitively. You can also have more clear control over all the session participants.
Collaborate Update
Outcomes and Conclusion
Zoom Apps monetization OKR is on track to 30M MRR. We have increased the MAU baseline by over 30%.
Zoom Apps team has contributed to Zoom’s revenue and overall impact by offering a new revenue stream and enhancing the platform's value. Zoom takes a 15% commission on app sales through its App Marketplace, and also handles billing support for developers. This model allows Zoom to benefit from the growth of its app ecosystem while providing a seamless purchasing experience for the users.
Zoom Apps are designed to boost teamwork and productivity by integrating essential tools directly into the Zoom environment. This created a central hub for collaboration, allowing teams to work together in real time on documents, presentations, and other files.
The apps save time and reduce distractions by minimizing the need to switch between different applications. They streamlined our workflows, automate tasks, and made it easier to find and share information, ultimately increasing efficiency.
For meetings, Zoom Apps provide relevant tools and information to enhance engagement and help with decision-making. You can also customize your experience with apps that are tailored to your specific needs.
Finally, using Zoom Apps can lead to cost and time savings by reducing the number of app subscriptions needed and cutting down on time spent searching for information.