Zoom mini-screensharing
When you screenshare on Zoom, it is handled in a heavy-handed, imposing manner - taking viewers' screens over and minimizing people's webcam feeds. Sometimes that's the effect you're looking for, though other times you're looking for something more subtle that can act to inform interested parties but doesn't hijack everyone's attention.
Why not have bots join the call, only to use their webcam input as a small notifications screen? This new real-estate could be used for:
- data visualizations
- live poll results
- URL sharing (shortner or QR code)
- countdown timers
- live monitoring of metrics/SLAs/tickets
Currently, viewers are forced to pull up the content on their own device, distracting them from the meeting's conversation.
Do you see yourself using such a tool? What would you use it to share?
The functionality sounds useful, but commercially i wouldn't touch this idea:
The same day that Zoom implements the same feature you are out of business.
Agreed - though they do seem to be encouraging devs to build for their marketplace. Could very much be 'see what the market wants and built it internally,' but either way, if the product is improved then mission accomplished!
Yeah, i think you nailed it. It's great for the "platform product" owner in any case: they either get mediocre feature-as-plugin for free, or then they get great validated plugin idea for free.
And for the developer, in addition of the risk of cloning, there's all sorts of sudden ban, policy change, API discontinuation, etc risks. Just really weak position to be in.
I love the idea! How would you control the content of such notification screen? I'd love to see some wireframe to make sure I'm on the same page though
Content can be controlled via webapp, accessible via URL shared in chat by bot or on mobile by entering meeting ID/scanning QR code.
For visualizations, you could just pass it URLs to image file.
Countdowns could be setup via chat, as could agenda items.
It hasn't gotten around to mockup phase, will make sure to share anything that comes of it.
I used Zoom yesterday and find it a little clunky. As a host it’s always a challenge to share your screen, and then it locks everything else out if you’re doing a presentation that’s running full screen. I had the two videos in the top right corner and couldn’t move them out of the way. Ugh. Anything that improves how it works and if that’s help from a bot then why not.
Sorry to hear about your troubles - I recall my first uses of Zoom left me guessing why they're allegedly so valuable (the answer seems to be connection reliability and capacity).
The UX is clunky at best, they could use a refresh. That's probably why they're inviting fresh blood to their marketplace.
Didn't know about that investment side of things. Hopefully they'll get some good people involved.
What do you do in a call with enough people to hide some thumbnails? Does zoom afford the ability to ensure all callers are always visible? Or perhaps allow a user to pin certain thumbnails?
That's an excellent point which I hadn't accounted for. In the side-by-side view, where you have some of the participants' thumbnails you also have left/right scrolling arrows, which let you pick a screen. You can also 'pin' a participant's view to your main window (or second display, if you use it).
You're right that there's not much more control over thumbnails than that. I'm willing to bet that >60% of the meetings are for 6 or fewer people.