Impact

Led product vision, architecture and design. Defined the MVP (minimum viable product) - which led to a fully staffed team. Read what Wired wrote about Clips!

Introduction

Zoom is a video conferencing platform allowing users to connect online for video meetings, webinars and live chat. As hybrid work has increasingly become the standard in a post-pandemic world, Zoom’s direction moved towards more collaborative products

Problem

While Zoom Meetings allowed for Cloud recordings, there was not an easy way to share shorter Clips meant for asynchronous communication.

Goal

To create a feature which allows for quick video sharing and screen-recording outside of a meeting

My role

• Led product and design effort as first team member (and only team member for first 3 months)
• Define design and engineering needs for MVP and post MVP
• Defined product placement across the Zoom platform

UX Summary

What is the experience? To summarize:

Use cases

While working on Clips, there was an existential question on “why Clips?” More specificially - what is the difference between a Clip and a Cloud recording (a recording of a Zoom Meeting)

1. Missed meetings

Recordings: entry point inside a meeting

• Assume users will use to record multiple participant meetings
• Assume recordings are meant for a “missed” event rather than a form of communication
• Meant as a form of spectating event
• Assume users will use video

2. Async meetings

Walk through research, ideation, iteration, and outcomes. Keep the content visually centered with left-aligned text.

3. Knowledge share

Broad knowledge sharing: entry point is external to the meeting

• Assume recorded event is meant for spectating
• Assume broad sharing
• Assume users will usually use screen share and video

Clip's identity

Zoom's clips would solve for the use cases of 2 and 3, while Meeting's and it's recordings solve for use case 1.

Clip's prototype

Prototype of MVP experience

Watch and engage

Showing the video with comments

Library

Clips within the zoom client

Solutions

To get to this point, the design went through multiple iterations

Feedback

Tested the feature internally. Feedback came back in the form of a chat channel. Overall the feedback was positive:

• OMG I LOVE CLIPS
• Hi team - I just used clips for the first time. Love it!! I use it all the time. I used to do it with Loom...
• Wow - very impressed with the first version of Clips, great work everyone.

Constructive criticism

While the overall user experience was positive, there were requests on some improvements

• Sharing was defaulted to private - this was not intuitive as the main use case was to immediately share the Clip. The clip could not be viewed unless permissions were changed
• Due to technical requirements - video settings were split between the Meeting’s video settings and the Clips video settings. This caused some confusion to users, especially around background noise suppression
• Other users requested more customization with the Clips including custom thumbnail uploading and other video customizations

Media reception

Take a look at what the media has written about it!

Outcomes

Beyond the media's reception, Zoom's blog post on Clips became one of it's all-time most viewed posts. It's become a powerful asynchronous solution for video meetings.