UX Design
Case study: Better host experience on Google Meet
Designing a solution to provide meeting hosts a better & barrier-free experience.
The idea for this case study was born during the lockdown. Because of the pandemic, all my college classes are conducting online on Google Meet. During the online classes, I noticed my professors faced a lot of problems as a host. They were not able to admit all or mute all the participants which led to increasing class timings. Along with it, they were not able to identify the student just by his name, & they cannot fix the students for the class.
So I thought to design a solution to make the Google Meet host’s experience better and effortless. The solutions designed for teaching faculties will not only benefit the teaching faculties but also the host of other domains.
Problem
Google meet is a fantastic, easy-to-use application. However, it lacks few options & doesn’t give much control to the meeting host over the participants, compared to the Zoom and other video conferencing applications. Thus, resulting in decreasing the host’s overall meeting experience, productivity, & time efficiency.
Duration & tools used
Duration: 2 weeks
Tools used: Figma, & Whimsical
Research 🔎
The research was a very crucial step to begin to design the solution because the research was the only way which will tell me whether the problem I noticed is genuine or not & designing a solution really benefits a large group of people or not. I categorized the research into three parts i.e. target audience, interviewing with the target audience, & market research.
Target Audience
I began the research by finding the target audience that uses Google Meet heavily. For this, Google was the best option to find out the audience based upon news articles and statistics reports.
I found a news article of March 2020. Google Cloud Chief Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post, Google Meet’s day-over-day growth has exceeded 60 percent, with daily usage now 25x higher than it was in January. This article made me sure that there are a massive number of people who are using Google Meet.
Some of my Google search queries include:
- Who uses Google Meet a lot?
- Areas/fields where Google Meet is being used
- The boom in Google Meet usage during the pandemic 📈
After Googling heavily, my target audience was channelized into three types:
Interviewing the target audience
Two persons from each type of target audience were selected and interviewed. Some were interviewed over a call and some were sent text messages which included four questions:
- 😟😐😃 How was your experience while using Google Meet as a host for online classes/webinars/meetings?
- ⭐ How much would you like to rate the Google Meet out of 5?
- ❌ What problems do you face as a host while using Google Meet?
- ✅ What features should be added according to you in Google Meet to make it better for you as a host?
*Some answers to the third question were mostly the solution of the problems asked in the second question.
After interviewing the audience, I came to know about the more practical problems faced by the meeting host which I never thought of.
Market Research 📊
I researched about the Google Meet considering its market position & also did competitor analysis by comparing it to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, & Cisco Webex, considering their online user reviews (mostly three stars), & the differences between their services, features, & user (host) experience. Competitor analysis gave me a clear idea of the solutions which are highly needed in Google Meet.
Research Insights
Host Persona
I created host personas based upon the research and interviews conducted with the target audience. Personas helped me to monitor the needs, experiences, & pain points of the audience. Thus, assisting me to understand the host journey and making it less complex and easier to plot.
Host Journey
Tracking the host’s journey throughout the meeting helped me know the difficulties faced by the hosts during their journey, from starting the meeting to ending it.
I was inspired by the concept used by Growth Design members, the way they use to show the customer journey in their case studies. So, I made a host journey map in a graphical representation where the Y-axis depicts the psych level of the host & the X-axis depicts the host journey.
Empathy Mapping
Being the first step in design thinking, I did empathy mapping to understand what a host actually feels, does, thinks, & does. I put myself into the host’s shoes to know how he/she might be feeling about his/her problems, & situations during the meeting/class.
Task Flow
Drawing a task flow helped me to quickly identify the key areas where intervention is needed.
Problem Identification
Till this point, after reviewing the research, personas, journey map, empathy mapping, & task flow chart, I clearly identified the problem whose solution is to be designed and my whole focus was narrowed down to those problems.
Challenge
Identify the scenarios where the host is facing problems & designing a solution that could bridge those gaps and assist him/her in dealing with these situations better, thus making the meeting experience simple, better, and barrier-free.
Brainstorming & Ideation
Brainstorming my mind to design a better solution just blew up my mind. Many new ideas were brought and were canceled because they didn't fit well. Brainstorming began from finding all the possible solutions to what features the solution will contain.
Possible Solutions
In my mind, only two possible solutions were visible to me. I searched on the internet about how new features/options are added to a web application. I ended up getting only two possible solutions & the same were in my mind:
- Create a plugin
- Implementing the in-app features
What is the final solution?
The final solution decided was to implement in-app features.
Why not a plugin? Plugin was rejected because the plugin provides extra functionality to the application needed by some users only. Also, when it comes to plugin, plugin is limited to a browser only whereas in-app features can be accessed from any browser without any installation of plugin.
Did I miss something?
Yes, my attention was drawn towards a missing feature i.e., we’re giving an option to fix the participants for a particular meeting but where will the host find that fix participants meeting? The solution to this is, if the host creates a fixed participant meeting, it will be saved automatically to the newly developed feature called ‘Favorites’, accessible from the Google Meet’s home page. Host can even save public meetings to ‘Favorites’ to use them later in the future.
Features
In the end, features were finalized to be included in the final design solution which includes:
- Favorites
- Public meeting link
- Fix participant meeting option
- ‘Mute all’ & ‘Admit all’ option
- Display participant’s information
- Screen share control
- Overlay display to see participants during screen sharing
Layout idea from other applications
I looked at other video conferencing applications to get ideas about the layout, user interface, & how they’ve integrated their features into their applications.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams has a very good name when it comes to arrange team meeting conferences. It has interactive features to make a conference more engaging. Its message threads are appreciated a lot for discussion friendly text chat.
Zoom
Zoom is a widely used application for video conferencing and online classes. Among all the other applications, Zoom gives the best meeting controls to host over the participants. I took the idea of how Zoom has implemented the ‘admit all’ & ‘mute all’ feature. It also allows the host to control who can share their screen.
Cisco Webex
I’ve heard about Cisco Webex used only for team meetings, not for online classes much as compared to other applications. I referred to Webex to get ideas about the user interface.
Discord
Discord? Why did I referred to discord?
Discord doesn’t come in the list of video conferencing applications. However, Discord’s screen overlay feature is really good when it comes to comparison with the Zoom’s minimized window pop-up. So the only reason why I referred to Discord is due to its screen overlay feature.
Sketches
Sketching the design was similar to a brainstorming session for me because drawing the sketches also took brainstorming regarding the placing of the elements and their spacing with the other new/existing elements of the Google Meet. Some of the options like giving a name to the meeting to find it easily in the favorites came to my mind while sketching.
Final Design
Favorites
Introducing the all-new feature name as ‘Favorites’ on the Google Meet home page where you can find your favorite marked meetings at one place to use them in the future.
During sketching, I forgot to prepare an interface for favorites. Interface for favorite hit my mind in the last, after I designed all the features.
So here we go. In favorites, we can find our favorite marked meetings with their meeting codes, the date of when they were marked as favorite, & their timestamps. We can also delete the meetings.
You may be thinking how can we give a name to our meeting & from where we can mark them as favorite. Don’t worry, we’ll see them in upcoming designs.
Public meeting
Host can now create a public meeting. which can be accessed by anyone having the meeting code without getting admitted by the host. This is very useful for the webinar and online workshop organizers who don’t want to admit hundreds of people.
Redesigned participant admit request window
Admit request window now shows incoming participant’s email. Thus, making host decision making easier whether to admit the participant or not.
The problem which I heard the most especially from the professors was that they cannot decide whether the participant is genuine or not just by seeing the name because many times fake students use to come in online class and they do mischievous activity. And it is difficult for a professor to remember every student’s name.
Admit request window also has a cross option to ignore the request. The host can later find that request in the waiting area.
Waiting area? Yes, we’ll see an option of a waiting area in an upcoming design.
Fix participants
The host can create a fixed participant meeting by fixing the participants for a particular meeting. The host doesn’t need to admit the participants to the meeting who are fixed. By default, a fixed participant meeting is marked as favorite, the host only needs to name the meeting.
This feature is highly useful for the professors. They can fix the students for their online classes which will restrict the incoming of fake students.
Meeting name
Meeting can be given a name by typing the name in the top left corner of the Google Meet. Favorite option is available right next to the meeting name to mark the meeting as favorite.
Present settings
The host can now control who can present his/her screen during the meeting by changing the settings in the present settings option.
Mute all
A highly requested feature during my research was an option to mute all the participants in the meeting at one click. ‘Mute all’ option is also the highest requested feature in the Google Meet feedback and Google said that their developers are working on this feature.
In my final design, I redesigned the in-call area to add a ‘mute all’ toggle switch on the top right corner of the participants list.
Participant info
In-meet participant’s email and his/her time of joining can be seen from the three-dot option right next to the participant’s name.
Admit all + waiting area
The second highest requested feature during my research was an ‘admit all’ feature. To add an ‘admit all’ feature, I redesigned the people area and added an option of waiting area right next to the in-call where the host can see and admit all the incoming participants at once by clicking on the ‘Admit all’ button placed at the top right corner of incoming participants list.
Screen overlay
During the interview, professors told that they cannot see their students while they sharing their screen due to this the professors have to go back to Google Meet to see their students or meeting participants.
While sharing the screen, the host can see their participants in a vertical view inside a vertical rectangular box. The host can also see participants chat messages without any need to go back to Google Meet.
Is that it?
Yes, here this case study ends.
Initially, the idea for this case study was to design a solution to make the Google Meet host experience better was originated to help the teaching faculties. However, later in research, it was found that not only the teaching faculties but the webinar organizers and conveners can will also get benefit from these solutions. And if we see from more wide perspective, the in-meet participants will also get benefit from the solution like feature to mark meeting/class as favorite. This ‘Favorites’ feature can also be used by the participants to save the meetings, thus, removing the tension of forgetting to bookmark the meeting link.
Special thanks to Utkarsh Gill for helping me in my UX design journey.
Thank you so much for reading this case study. Suggestions are always welcomed.
Feel free to ping me on LinkedIn or Instagram.
You can email me at arshkaushik21@gmail.com
