Error states and integrations to bring Zoom meetings into virtual reality

Mapping mental models of a meeting to launch Zoom in VR

Problem

One of Workrooms’ major hurdles was getting people to incorporate VR meetings into their daily work rituals and one way to do that is by integrating existing productivity tooling into VR. Zoom is one of those tools. The idea is that while most people do not have VR headsets, they will be have some form of video-conferencing (VC) tooling that, once connected, can act as a window into VR.

What I did

Who I worked with

2 Designers 1 Researcher 1 Product Manager 5 Engineers 1 Localisation Manager 3 Product Marketing Managers 2 Marketing Managers 1 Content Strategist

Constraints

How we did it

⚽🥅Step 1. Kick off… and step back?

In this case study, we’ll look at what went wrong and how we pivoted to ensure we hit deadline.

Authentication

One of the first hurdles we encountered was Zoom added a stipulation, requiring our users to be on a paid-for tier to use the Zoom integration because of the SDK privacy requirements.

This had some knock-on effects. Chiefly, that we needed to now design an authentication flow; somewhere that allowed people to connect their Zoom and Workrooms accounts. Experientially, this wasn’t too much of a stretch for our users because we already had a similar system for connecting their 3P calendar to Workrooms. To support this, we created a net-new Apps and integrations tab in Settings and I suggested we collapse the calendar connection flows in there too. When we user tested this however not a single person could find Settings, let alone the Apps and integrations tab.

Apps and integrations tab on Workrooms settings were too hidden.

I suggested we do two things:

1/ Add a promotional popover on Workrooms calendar that allowed users to connect their Zoom account. Calendar was prime real estate and made the most sense as it was also where people scheduled meetings and could add a VC of their choice for the meeting, so because this seemed contextual it would increase adoption.

2/ If users dismissed the popover, it would not reappear, so I suggested we add a second place to authenticate on Workrooms calendar; under the new Zoom video-calling option on the Workrooms meeting scheduling tool. PD pushed back on that as we didn’t have a suitable component but I asked our UXR to validate and they eventually gave in with a little-lot of coercion, leading to new designs.

That led to a 100% click-thru rate and 80% increase in meetings in Workrooms. Not one person has authenticated from the Settings tab to date.

Adding a popover to the Workrooms calendar helped drive adoption and led to an 80% increase in meetings.

I also kicked off XFN alignment about the CTA, “Connect”. This may seem small but it was crucial. We had another CD working on an asset repository that also required an authentication flow and they were using Login as their chief CTA.

I pointed out to them that this was misleading; a user could be both logged in to their Zoom (or Google) account but not connected. Logging in and connecting were two separate steps in the authentication flow.

We eventually aligned on Connect.

Meeting models

The second problem we ran into was to do with our meeting model. The idea of a meeting is so ubiquitous, we never really think about what it actually is. Is it time or space bound? We had to think about that with this project.

Workrooms was space-bound. It operated on a 1:1 model and each workroom was a persistent space, meaning that you are always joining the same room every time you land in VR. For our team, this meant that we had a persistent video call (VC) bridge; you could join on VC at anytime without requiring scheduling and the feed was always open, so anyone could join at anytime without there needing to be an event.

Zoom operates completely differently and is time-bound. It generates a unique meeting link per meeting that is unusable after that scheduled event.

There was an opportunity here to either align Workrooms with Zoom; the more culturally-accepted meeting model, which would mean blowing up the persistency model and completely rewiring Workrooms, or the worst case scenario which was having both. The latter was what senior leads aligned on and we didn’t really have leeway to push back on that. Plus it would have meant more work elsewhere in the product and a complete refactoring of the VRVC bridge stack.

Things we considered here

In practice, this meant me and my PD sitting down together and crafting meeting start and end time logic.

Mapping how Zoom meetings would fit into our existing meeting model.

Content played a big part in setting expectations and establishing the difference between a Workrooms meeting and a Zoom meeting.

It also served a practical purpose. With Zoom, we now needed users to manually connect and disconnect to/from the VC bridge (you do this today if you press “Join” and “Leave” on a Zoom call). We needed to create a new suite of notifications, prompting people to manually start and end the Zoom call.

This was not perfect and lots of things need to be true for this be effective.

For these prompts to be truly successful they need to be persistent and in a place everyone can see them at the same time. In the future, we might want to make the VC screen an affordance for joining; add a ringer sound to grab attention and allow people to connect to Zoom call from there.

Authentication

The last hurdle we encountered was the many things that could go wrong with authentication. We had over 35 different, non-combination error states related to wrong settings enabled or disabled. I wanted these to be useful, friendly and encouraging.

I added colour co-ord in the image panel to make it clear from scanning alone something had gone wrong or was incomplete.

Three of the many error messages a user might see. (1) User has connected their Zoom and Workrooms account, but is not on the appropriate plan. (2) User, or admin does not have the required Zoom Settings turned on to support Workrooms <> Zoom meetings. (3) This Zoom account has admin-enabled access and needs an admin to turn on the appropriate Zoom meetings.

Positive state

Zoom meeting card on Workrooms calendar that allowed users to host their Zoom meeting in VR, by simply adding a workroom.

Impact