Increasing interactivity & participation in virtual Zoom classrooms
Zoom has skyrocketed as one of the most popular video-conferencing platforms amongst schools & universities for online learning. However, Zoom’s virtual classroom experience isn’t as engaging and interactive as an in-person experience.
In this case study, I re-design the breakout room experience to increase usage & student participation. I also designed some fun visual & interactive features using a proposed integration with Bitmoji, a customizable avatar app popular with Gen-Z.
Timeline
May - July 2021 (3 months)
Role
Product Designer
Responsibilities
User research, visual & interaction design, usability testing
Problem
Zoom wasn’t originally tailored for students, & thus doesn’t work for their short attention spans
Zoom is first and foremost for the workplace. However, the COVID-19 pandemic saw Zoom’s popularity amongst schools & universities soar, primarily due to how easily it integrates with existing educational platforms like Canvas and Blackboard.
But students aren’t learning as well online as they would in the classroom. They’re not able to adequately interact with their peers & teachers, which is a valuable aspect of in-person schooling that’s hard to replicate.
And students aren’t afraid to air out these frustrations online - check out a handful of the countless tweets I found from students complaining about online learning.
Not acknowledging Education users’ needs has potential negative business impact.
If Zoom classes aren’t engaging, students will stop participating & attending class, leading to poor grades & budget cuts to schools; schools will then be enticed to switch from Zoom to a competing platform.
How does Zoom currently imitate the classroom experience?
Breakout rooms separate participants into their own spaces where hosts can join into one room at a time, similarly to how students are grouped at tables in classrooms. However, it’s impossible for teachers to know what’s going on in all breakout rooms at once - so students are responsible for facilitating discussions amongst themselves, with no accountability.
Research
Educators’ thoughts on online classes
I interviewed 5 educators, ranging from primary school teachers to undergraduate teaching assistants.
I asked my participants about their experiences using Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms to conduct online classes, as well as comparing their students’ presences online vs. in person.
Usually only the same few kids turn on their cameras and speak up. Those are the kids I know well. The rest I don’t.
We don’t use [breakout rooms] cause the kids don’t participate.
They really like being creative. Sometimes we’ll do drawing videos together, where I play a painting tutorial on YouTube and they follow along. They love those.
Summary of pain points
Lack of interactivity
Students struggle to pay attention in long virtual classroom sessions. They rarely participate unless they're being called on or being engaged through games and interactive activities.
Lack of interpersonal connections
It’s hard to get to know one another in a Zoom classroom, even if you see each other every day. Teachers have trouble getting to know their students because they rarely ever see their faces.
It’s hard to keep students accountable
Teachers wear a lot of hats. It's hard to do things like take attendance and facilitate breakout rooms while teaching.
Design goal
Drive interactivity & participation through an immersive, engaging virtual learning experience.
Keeping students engaged in class leads to better attendance & academic performance. Students will be a lot more likely to show up to class and participate if the environment caters more to them and building social relationships with their peers.
From a business perspective, introducing features that increases engagement & leads to better grades and incentivizes school districts & universities to keep their Zoom subscriptions.
Ideation
Brainstorming ways to foster increased participation in virtual classes
I focused on ways to keep students accountable in the classroom, exploring both “strict” methods of encouraging participation vs. more social & fun methods.
Narrowing down my ideas
I started having second thoughts about the Pictionary idea. Would introducing one game into Zoom be worth the engineering effort? Additionally, would other Zoom users like personal & business users find this feature useful in the long term? Regarding accessibility, how would users with motor and visual impairments be able to participate?
Due to all of these concerns, I decided to narrow my focus on breakout rooms & avatars.
Validation
Measuring the intuitiveness of my prototypes
I conducted usability testing on teachers & students to test how intuitive the prompt creation system was for users, as well as if the changes I had made to breakout rooms would make them more intriguing. For the Bitmoji features, my goal with validation was to see how seamlessly my ideas blend in to Zoom’s current interface.
Adding & customizing profile pictures
Adding a prompt
Iteration
Improving the user flow & making “fun” features more accessible
From my usability testing, I was able to narrow down the following common issues and iterate accordingly.
Issue 1: 3/4 of my participants were initially unsure what “broadcasts” were, but once they clicked around they were able to figure it out. I renamed the feature to Prompts from Broadcasts added a graphic and more detailed description on the Prompts tab.
Issue 2: Participants misunderstood the icons I used to track user participation in breakout rooms. Instead of using the loudspeaker icon to gauge individual participation, I introduced heat-mapped activity bars to periodically track overall room activity.
Final solution
Immersive breakout rooms and a fun, collaborative meeting environment
Breakout room prompts allow hosts (teachers) to broadcast timed prompts to all breakout rooms. Hosts can queue multiple prompts in advance, so they can spend less time facilitating discussions and more time joining in on rooms & actually collaborating with students.
Breakout rooms use periodically updating activity bars, so the host can easily see which rooms have the least participation.
Joining rooms is highlighted to encourage teachers to participate in conversations in rooms, lessening the disconnect between teachers & students in breakout room sessions.
Users can connect their Bitmoji accounts to their Zoom accounts, allowing them to use their avatars as profile pictures. This encourages users to express their creativity, and has a high potential for scaling,
MVP & plan of action
Prioritizing improvements to the breakout room experience
A realistic plan for implementation focuses on prioritizing activity monitoring then breakout room prompts.
The prompts feature is a lot more robust, and implementing monitoring is a small step to bridging the disconnect between the host & participants in rooms.
To break up the complexity of the prompts feature, an intermediary step could be Milestone 2, the ability to create one timed prompt at a time. If lots of people end up using prompts, then the feature could expand to Milestone 3 where users can create multiple prompts.
Bitmoji integration is a longer & more complicated process that requires more stakeholders, so I believe it should have its own separate timeline. A proposed plan for implementation would start with Bitmoji integration, then would continue to more complex features based on user adoption and feedback.
Future vision
Focusing on creativity & customization
The pandemic has proven a need for video conferencing tools that help mimic real-life scenes and situations. Even though virtual learning won’t completely replace in-person learning, Business Zoom users face lot of issues that Education users face too - so designing features with Education users first is a step in the right direction.
Following Zoom’s implementation of Immersive mode in 2021, integrating “spaces” that replicate real life places into Zoom would be a great next step. Facebook recently introduced their Horizon Workspaces app that lets employees attend virtual meeting spaces as 3D avatars. New video conferencing tools like Gather are rapidly gaining popularity due to their customizable video-game like spaces.
Conclusion
Reflecting on what I’ve learned
The biggest problem I faced was definitely narrowing down my problem space. I started off my case study by focusing on educators’ needs, but later realized that students drove Zoom’s usability. I had to make sure my solutions would benefit the entire Zoom user ecosystem (Personal, Business, and Education users).
Another struggle I had was with ideation. I wasn’t sure how “big” or complex I should make my solutions, and how “well” these solutions would solve the problems I identified. I focused too much on practical and realistic ideas based on my own experiences with software development - I would design huge, complicated features, then would not be able to fully implement them. However, I realized that with ample planning, realistic milestones, and a large enough budget, even the most “complex” designs can potentially be implemented.
Finally, I had to pivot a lot based on feedback. My resulting solution was pretty far from what I had originally thought it was going to be, which just goes to show that what you think users want is not always what users actually want. This project definitely taught me to not make assumptions!
Thank you to all of the wonderful educators & students who agreed to participate in this case study! I’d also like to thank my mentor, Jennifer Wong, as well as all of my friends at Product Design Fam for all their feedback and support 🥰
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