Zoom is a very general tool. Most of the time, for most purposes, it works (mostly). Webinars are fine, until your host can’t stop sharing their screen. Virtual conferences are fine, until you want to exchange contact info.
Right now, solutions are being hacked together to make Zoom sort of work in a lot of scenarios that it frankly was not built for. As designers, this has been frustrating to watch. A virtual gathering is an experience like any other, and it should be thoughtfully designed and considered.
What else might be possible? Starting with a design scenario, a science-heavy virtual product demonstration, we asked our R&D team: how would this event run if you built it from the ground up? Could you prototype a better digital gathering experience?
The Brief
Our team broke the day down into three segments: arrival, the demo itself, and a post-event happy hour. At each stage, they thought about the pain points and missing opportunities in traditional product demos, as well as their Zoom-ified counterparts.
Segment 1: Arrival
What should it be like to enter a virtual event? Hint: it’s not a mix of half-on, half-off cameras or a cacophony of unmuted microphones with kids and coffee machines in the background.