Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash
Recently a friend of mine asked me to review a blog he wrote suggesting some new features for zoom that he wanted to see. For better or worse, we’ve all become zoom super users with demands on this new tool we use all day. While his suggestions didn’t resonate with me, he did inspire me to write about a few things I'd like to see that would greatly improve my productivity with zoom. In short, I'd like to put a little more zoom in zoom.
In this article, I highlight 4 improvements I’d like to see in a future release of zoom. Let me know if these resonate with you!
Idea #1: Join next meeting with 1 click, not 6!
Like many of us, I often have back-to-back zoom meetings. What I find horribly inefficient about zoom in this scenario is that it doesn’t help me get to my next zoom. I quit the current one (one click), go to my calendar (2nd click), click on the next meeting (3rd click), find the JOIN NOW button, click on that (4th click), which opens a tab in my browser asking me again if I want to join the meeting. I click on Join (5th click), and then the zoom app opens and it asks me if I want to Join the audio, so I click yet again (6th click) to join the meeting. Six clicks to get to the next zoom meeting. This is insane. Before all this clicking, I was in a zoom meeting with all my audio and video settings just the way I wanted them and zoom knows I have another meeting coming up. So, when it’s time to join my next zoom meeting, zoom should simply ask me if I want to join the next meeting and allow me to get there directly in one click. We could call this feature “zoom.next”; I'm happy to file a Jira user story.
Idea #2: What Zoom am I in?
Ever join a zoom and you’re the only one there for the first few minutes? You start to think that perhaps you joined the wrong zoom, right? You’ve got a lot of zoom meetings in your calendar and multiple calendar invites open on your desktop. You could have easily clicked on the wrong one, right? Maybe everyone is in the other zoom wondering where you are… This happens to me every couple of days. What do you do? Unlike WebEx, there’s no Zoom-ID you can easily find in a zoom “Meeting Info” menu. This drives me crazy. Solution: Put the meeting title in the zoom window somewhere. You can see an example of this I mocked up in the zoom UI in the next section.
Idea #3: Manage Concurrent Zooms
Have you ever joined 2 zoom meetings at the same time? I did this once, and the behavior was really odd. Participants in each meeting could hear me, but they could not hear each other. Neither zoom meeting was aware that I had also joined another zoom. Let me suggest something much better. I am often invited to 2 or 3 zoom meetings at the same time. Wouldn't it be great if you could join them all?
I’d like to manage which Zoom I’m currently giving my attention to, but I’d also like to see the other zoom sessions and switch to them when desired. In short, I’d like to manage my participation in multiple concurrent zoom meetings.
In the mockup below, you can see that I’ve added identification of each zoom meeting in a colorful title bar above each zoom instance (thus satisfying Idea #2 above).
In the right-side panel, I’ve mocked up a tabbed interface showing the proposed “My Zooms” tab in front where I can manage all my Concurrent Zooms as well as see what’s upcoming.
If I were to click on the “Budget Review” zoom meeting for instance, that zoom window would swap positions with the “Tom Payne’s Birthday” zoom. The audio and camera settings remain as they were. Also, for the zoom meetings that you're not currently giving your attention to, there’s a blank tile with your name in it, like the one shown above for Joel Francis. Something like BRB might be nice to let them know you’re in another zoom at the moment.
Also in the right panel, but not shown in detail is the Chat tab. This tab should allow me to see and participate in all current meeting chats. If the people in the Team Lunch meeting want to get my attention, there needs to be a way for them to ping me (perhaps popping up a little notifier), in addition to sending me a chat message.
Idea #4: Smooth transfer to another device
I'd like a simple way to quickly transfer my zoom conversation to another device in just the same way my car has a “Transfer to phone” button. Why is this needed? Sometimes I’m on a zoom call at my desk, but in the middle of the call, I remember I need to drop a letter in the mail or pick up something from the grocery store. I’d like to transfer the zoom to my mobile directly. To do this today, you need to find the meeting invite on your phone calendar click on the zoom, make sure you don't have speaker phone on and thus cause a ton of feedback to with you desktop call. You join the call on your phone and then drop the call on the laptop. Then, when I return from my errand, I’d like to transfer it back with one click. I expect this might require some setup such as configuring zoom with mobile number. But, once this is done, I shouldn’t have to do the setup again.
Summary
Our work environment has changed forever, and our tools need to keep up. I want zoom to inform me of my next zoom meeting and allow me to join it immediately (and perhaps send a quick message to the participants there that I’ll be a few min late). I want to know that the zoom I joined is the one I meant to join, and I want to manage multiple zooms at the same time. Finally, when I need to step away from my desk, I want to take my zoom with me, so I want zoom to transfer my connection to my mobile with one click.
Future Thoughts…
These few enhancements would certainly make working with zoom a lot more pleasant and productive. More importantly, however, adding these features to zoom enhances the whole work experience and transitions zoom from just another communications app to something much more. Zoom can be the virtual work environment where we manage all our interactions with our fellow employees, partners, and customers. Something to think about…
