Students in remote education don’t feel like they’re getting the same quality of education that they did in person, and teachers can’t teach and monitor a class in the same way they did previously. This is seen most notably with group projects, where the feeling of communication and collaboration just isn't there.
The goal of this project is to explore how Zoom breakout rooms can be improved to optimize the experience for hosts and users with a two-way flow of communication, and make students feel present while instructors still feel like they have control.
How might we improve the collaboration experiences for students and teachers in remote education?
Redesigning Zoom breakout rooms to allow a more controlled viewpoint from the teacher's perspective, and facilitate better communication between students and teachers to improve overall experiences through a two-way communication flow.
To start my research I watched YouTube videos breaking down how to use breakout rooms for teachers, and read the comments from teachers to see what they had to say about it. I also researched reviews and opinions from teachers that I found through articles navigating how to use Zoom and discovered common patterns and trends from their responses.
To gain more insight and understand users' overall experiences with the breakout room functions from the users themselves, I interviewed 3 students who are on Zoom in classroom settings, as well as 3 people who use Zoom to host classes – an academy teacher, a freelance tutor, and an art instructor.
After collecting the reviews from my research and the responses from my interviews, I wrote down commonalities that were mentioned between everyone and organized them into three categories. These categories were the main themes that I wanted to focus on finding a solution for.
📍 Pain Points
Goal: Design a solution to give professors more control and help students and professors have better communication in a quick and efficient way.
Based on the pain points identified from the user reviews/research, user interviews, and affinity map, I’ve determined two user archetypes. These are the users my design will be centered around:
🧑🏫 Teachers, professors, tutors
🧑🎓 Students
After compiling the results from my research and interviews, I drafted ideas and made more clearer sketches as it developed. My goal from these sketches were to ideate an efficient and intuitive design that is helpful and easy to understand.
Using the sketches from the previous step, I was able to turn them into a simple wireframe on Figma. This wireframe illustrates what the host/professor’s perspective of the breakout rooms would look like.
🕵️ Be curious!
Getting to lean into my curiosity and learning how to think inquisitively expanded my ability to design. When I started this project I was wholly unfamiliar with how Zoom's breakout rooms worked, especially from the host's perspective. While designing for a user that I couldn't really connect with seemed challenging at first, being eager to experiment, research, and actually having an interest in what I'm trying to learn about allowed me to tap into new ideas, processes, and methodologies, and helped hone my problem-solving mindset.
💛 Have empathy
Even if you're designing for a group that you don't relate to, it's important to design with their perspective. While I love the redesign, as a student myself there were some features that I didn't like as much, solely because I personally liked having the distance from the teacher that I get digitally. However, my goal was to emulate the community, collaboration, and communication that students and teachers receive in a classroom setting for the people who do miss that. In my work I think that it's important to be able to listen to what your users – or your client, stakeholders, teams, etc. – need, and finding out what bothers them, even if it's not the same things that bother you, is the key to making things better for them.
