Collaborating with Newcomers – An Empirical Usability Study on Zoom

Abstract

During lock-downs and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic many people and many companies were forced to use online-tools to connect and to communicate with each other while being in home office or in the workplace. Paving the way for collaboration, the initiation-phase is crucial as people from various environments need to valuate mutual dispositions, build up trust, and explore each other’s intentions and capabilities. The online version of such a phase calls for easy-to-use tools that allow even newcomers to concentrate on the true purpose of that phase. On the example of Zoom, which is a cloud-based solution for that need and which is a major player in this vast market, we perform a usability evaluation of the Zoom desktop-client guided by Nielsen’s heuristics. As a result, we propose a redesign of the feature join meeting, which we tested against the original one by inexperienced users to find out which of them better serves the user’s needs.