Zoom Redesign
ROLE: Conduct contextual inquiry, create affinity diagram, personas, lo-fi & hi-fi prototyping
DURATION: September 2020 – November 2020
TEAM: Litong Peng, Juliann Thang, Jiaxuan (James) Sun, Li (Leah) Wang, Jeni (Randy) Wang
Overview
Zoom has increased in popularity due to educational institutions and workplaces implementing remote work because of COVID-19. As a group, we have noticed some issues that we or someone we know have experienced and hoped to redesign the platform to be catered more towards students and resolve common issues.
This was a semester long group project for a class.
Problem
“How can we prevent accidents and awkward meetings from continuously occurring for users on Zoom?”
Research
Each member was tasked with conducting multiple contextual inquiries independently among peers. Participants mainly consisted of past and present college students who were asked to give a walkthrough on how they utilized Zoom and to think aloud during the process while interviewers took notes. After all contextual inquiries were completed, we would share notes via an affinity diagram seen below

Goals
Create a Tutorial
Maintain Likeable Functions
Meet Users Expectations
It’s important that users remember the effects of functions and get the feedback they expect for a seamless experience
Improve UI
Solution


New Home Screen
The main buttons found on the home screen were changed and the meeting calendar was redesigned.
New Meeting and Join are now renamed to Instant Meet and Join a Meeting, respectively. A Meeting History button was added to allow users to easily access previously recorded meetings.
The redesigned calendar shows future meetings beyond the current date and better highlights the time and length of the meeting. Users are also able to select notes or input an entry about the scheduled meeting.
Wizard for Scheduling a Meeting
We redesigned the schedule meeting form as some users found it overwhelming. Our redesign includes a wizard to let users know their completion rate.
The form would only show the first section, then would show the next steps once the previous one was completed.



Signs Feature
The Signs feature replaces the status icons once hidden in the chat function. Users can now readily locate and choose icons to declare their current status.
Reflection
Some areas to continue on would be to create animations for the wizard to showcase how the steps would be shown and improve on showing users microphone or screen status to avoid confusion on whether these features are in use. There was a lot of hopes for this project, but we bit off more than we could chew.
Teamwork and balance are two things I learned throughout this semester long project. Members spanned across three different time zones so it was important that we were all able to communicate and plan accordingly to work on this project. Balancing school, work, and life in general during the pandemic was definitely an interesting time, but we managed to pull through!