This isn't "How Zoom works". It's a 72 slide deck of complaints about the Zoom UI.

I was surprised they didn't mention that after clicking 'Leave Meeting', a popup comes up with a 'Leave Meeting' button in it, that actually leaves the meeting. This inevitably means in every single Zoom meeting that everyone says goodbye and then spends a few awkward seconds actually leaving the meeting.

A large part seems to be about the invite feature and UI, which is something that I never encountered because I wouldn't even think about inviting people from inside a video conference software. Passing links around in other channels seems far more useful to me, and is the only way I access or share meetings. And Skype, where you first have to find the people you want to talk with is much, much more annoying there than just sending or receiving a link via an established channel like email. Of course there are many different use cases, and mine isn't necessarily representative.

But in general the most important part of the user experience for video conferencing is the amount of errors or bad connections that happen. For example, I recently use Microsoft Teams, one person was sharing the screen to present something, and for some people the shared screen simply froze and didn't update anymore. That kind of thing is seriously annoying.

The UI doesn't seem too important to me in this case because I almost never use any of it. After connecting in general the only button I use are mute and share screen. Doesn't mean the UI can't be significantly improved, but for me it isn't the most important part of the experience for a video conferencing tool.

When everything is chromium there is no competitive advantage for any of these chat applications. For example, before, Skype used to be based on the Qt framework and it used less resources and actually had more features - like universal push-to-talk and better integration into the OS.

Welcome to the future - lets Javascript all the things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U

Spot on. I really wonder if all those people claiming "Zoom just works, unlike x" have really believed that the first time joining a meeting, or if they're just used to its weird UX quirks.

Zoom has great video and audio. I think good echo cancellation, video that copes well with the network, lower latencies - we don't experience that directly but the after effect is you feel subjectively better about the experience.

I think picking each part of the UX apart is secondary to making the key feature work well.

I find the metaphor of a "call" in Skype or Google Meet easier to use for chats with relatives than the metaphor of a "meeting". The latter one works great in a business setting, when you "schedule a meeting" and post its details to Slack, or email them, or stick them in a calendar; but when you want an immediate one-on-one chat, it's so much easier to "call" a person.

Zoom weirds me out in that in order to chat with someone you need to "create a meeting", then copy the meeting url/id, and send it via a different channel to the person you want to chat with.

I really don't like the Mute/Unmute button in Zoom. It shows a button showing a crossed out mic with "Unmute" below it. And the other state for this button is a mic with "Mute" below it. The button's icon and text are always opposite of each other. It is so confusing. I always have to think twice before clicking it.

Great-great analysis! We need more of those exposing apparent lack of understanding of basic principles of usability by designers of many modern products. My instinct is to tell them, “Read The Design of Everyday Things at least, please!”

Ironically, I found this style of presentation difficult/annoying to navigate through

Heh, I expected it to dive into the fact that Skype also had some troubles with claiming E2E without actually implementing it, if I remember correctly. However, seeing a detailed takedown of poor design is always fun. I tend to overlook these things as a user or at least I'm unable to put into words why the design frustrates me, this is helpful.

Modern Browser have already build in, p2p, encrypted video chat functionality.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/...

I played around with it years ago, and it worked quite good and should have improved a lot since then, so why has no one come up with a solid solution, that does not require us to route our video calls through china, or microsoft servers?

I suppose the devil is, like always, in the details. So what am I missing?

Probably, that webrtc via p2p is hard to do for more than 2 people? But someone should have at least tried it?

What are some open source skype alternatives? The ones I have used all require central server. I would like to see something which is more p2p with super nodes.

Very well done, and very thoroughly delves into my own initial "WTF?" reaction to using Zoom for the first time (and second and third times).

Although I think the title is misleading. I was expecting something more technical, as most "how X works" articles and videos tend to be.

"Zoom's UI is bad" would be more descriptive. Even "How Zoom doesn't work" would be more accurate to the content.

I’ll never look at Zoom the same way again.

It was frustrating before. But now I know all of these UX faux pas...

Thanks BuiltForMars for taking away my blissful ignorance.

The only UX that matters in video conferencing software is connection UX, which is where Zoom excels.

Rumor was always that Skype used to have E2E, then Microsoft bought it for a susprising amount of money and as first action removed server-side encryption... And therefore of course the rumor/assumption thay the NSA or similar was in the back funding the deal.

My main complaints are two:

- It takes 4-5 clicks to create a meeting and share the URL, which is what I want to do most of the time, multiple times a day. I end up preferring Skype (when with only 1-2 other people) just because of the hassle of "Creating a meeting".

- The UI randomly moves around: the chat button and the chat, for example, are in a place when Zoom is in window mode, in a different place when Zoom is fullscreen, and yet another place when I'm sharing the screen. If I have to teach, I prepare the various zoom windows (chat, participants, videos) in a certain configuration. As soon as I start sharing screen everything changes. It goes fullscreen whenever it likes, and all that.

> Which does nothing unless you already have Zoom installed

At least on desktop, even though the help text explicitly says "If you have Zoom Client installed", you can actually click the Launch Meeting button/link to reveal a hidden option for joining the meeting without actually installing (which requires an additional click). I imagine this never shows up if you actually install; they're just trying to get people to install unnecessarily.

Irrelevant title but the UX analysis is on spot. It is a shame that many companies will spend millions on infrastructure and programming but don't pay for a decent UX team - or just do not bother implementing good UX. (Microsoft is the most striking example.)

Am I the only one to avoid Zoom for all the strange things reported these past few months ?

I came away from that somewhat nonplussed.

Think I've maybe used Zoom 3 times, but even I was mentally shouting answers to the rhetorical questions. "Well it does that because.." or "Well if it didn't do that, then users would.." etc

I agree with many of the observations in the deck, but how would you go about prioritizing the most impactful improvements? Is there a best in class method of quantifying how UX hurdles?

Again, what about Zoom's remote control feature (or annotate/whiteboard)? Is any competitor doing that?

Tweet that article mentioning the Zoom founder @ericsyuan and @zoom_us

We had millions of dollars of Cisco/Tandberg hardware in our offices. They worked OK (Telepresence was actually quite good, but $$$$).

We trialed every viable competitor in the space that we could find. Blue Jeans and High Five were finalists and I can’t remember which one we were close to settling for. Then a large snowstorm had us working at home for a few days and the experience of just trying to have a small leadership team meeting was miserable.

We paused and trialed zoom. This was probably 2015 or so. It was immediately clear that the audio on zoom was superior. It still is, IMO. (I do about 2% Chime meetings; the audio processing there is an utter joke compared to Zoom, IMO.)

If you can make the core feature of audio work and make on-boarding smooth, you can win a large part of the market, which I think is exactly what happened.

The real innovation Zoom brought to the table (IMHO) was not requiring you to make an account to join a call.

Inconsequential within a company where everyone already has a <whatever> account - but critical if it's a one-off or rare call - such as a vendor talking to a customer, a hiring manager inviting someone to interview, or a doctor calling a patient.

I think people just jumped on the 'Zoom bandwagon' and assumed it was great, because everyone kept saying how great it was.

What weird quirks? First time I joined a meeting I typed the code, clicked join with computer audio and everything worked. Where are the quirks?

Yes. From my experience (as a user), webrtc is good for up to 4 people, and is rarely supported for more than 8. Reason is that few laptops can cope with many more incoming and outgoing videostreams in parallel.

Also, when in our company we tried using webrtc for standups, we often faced issues when participant A couldn't hear participant B, but participant C could hear them both. All that with video working in all directions. Or sometimes we had this issue with video.

Another reason why standalone applications like Skype and Zoom (which is known for trying to install its client too much) might be better than webrtc is that they might have better noise-cancelling algorithms than browsers.

Also, point of usability - compared to browser, standalone apps don't have permission dialogs ("do you want to allow this website to access your camera"?) and might be smarter with choosing correct microphone by default - this might be important for non-techy users who don't understand why system suggests them to choose from two microphones when there's only one plugged into the computer.

Something like you describe was recently featured here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522689

That is what the browser apps use, like Google Meet, Facebook Messenger, Discord.