You are a product manager of Zoom. How would you go about designing a zoom like application for education?

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You are a product manager of Zoom. How would you go about designing a zoom like application for education?

Asked at Razorpay over a year ago

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Sandy M · Answer 1 · 2022-04-01T00:12:25+0000

Provide your feedback on my answer to this Razorpay product design question.

Candidate (C): Just to clarify: By zoom, you are referring to the video conference application. By "application for education", do you mean an app that teachers and students can use?

Interviewer (I): Yes

C: Is there a specific platform you want me to focus on?

I: No, please go ahead with your assumptions

C: I will go ahead and focus on mobile apps as it is likely the device of choice for students and probably the most impactful.

C: Thinking strategically, the education app space has quite a few players. There are school apps that teachers use to provide instruction (class content) , there are apps for teachers to communicate with parents, there are test taking apps etc. But, considering Zoom's core mission is "bringing people together through video conferencing", let's choose the goal of "live instruction for remote students". Is that ok?

I: Go ahead.

C: For the rest of my answer, I would like to identify a segment of users, prioritize their needs, brainstorm solutions and go from there. I am also assuming that we are building on top of Zoom's capabilities and not a stan-alone app.

The main user groups that come to mind are:

Teachers: Teachers will use the app to post live/recorded class instruction videos.
Students: Students will use the app to listen to classes/ perhaps interact with other classmates.
Parents: Parents will occassionally use the app to communicate with teachers.
Schools: Managing classes/ teachers and which students are in those.

Let's go ahead and pick Students because they are the largest group of users here. Let's list out a couple of user needs for this group and prioritize from them.

Students attending a video conferencing class might not be able to recall the key learnings from the session.
Students might be distracted by the surroundings of their home (unlike a physical classroom)
Students might not have access to print materials which teachers would normally give out in a classroom
Students may run into audio/video issues caused by slower internet speeds.

I'm going to pick the first user need as I think it is the most impactful on the Student group. Let's now brainstorm some solutions:

Build an automated note-taker that can summarize the entire session in 10 lines or less based on word frequency/stress/etc.
Pick small segments of video from the entire lecture (when student engagement was highest) and build a bite sized video summary.
Create tools for a teacher's assistant to manually input a summary/ print material

My prioritzing criteria would be based on impact, ease of use for the Teachers, scalability and engineering level of effort. Tabulating them for this criteria, the solution I will go ahead with is the "bite-sized video summary" for the teacher to share with her students.

Summary: We want to design a zoom like app for education. We narrowed down the goal to a "live instruction" scope. We started with the assumption of building on top of zoom's existing video capabilities and picked students as the core user group. One of their main user needs that it is not easy to remember/ recall what they learnt in a live session. The proposed solution is video summarizer that condenses the entire content to a few mins based on where the student engagement was highest in the video.

Taking a step back, I feel good about this solution as short-form video content does well, particularly with students and youger audiences. (A tik-tok/short that is auto generated from the class session). To mitigate risks of a poor quality summary, we can provide the teacher with the ability to edit the summary video before finalizing it.

Clay Nichols · Answer 2 · 2022-04-11T19:20:32+0000

Clarify
1. Zoom is a service for video conferencing and screen sharing, right? YES
2. What levels of Education? 9-12 (high school)
3. Who is the customer? Who is the user? School District, teachers & students
4. What are the goals of the School District? They want to minimize training of teachers & students.
  They want all teachers and all students using the system within 1 month of rollout with less than 2 hours of training for the Teachers and 15minutes of training for the students.
Constraints
1. What's our budget? You have 6 months and 5 Devs, 1 UX, 1 Tester
2. Can we use the core zoom features but have complete control over UI? YES
3. Any other constraints like requirements from School District? No. School District just wants to :
  1. minimize cost & training
  2. Satisfy teachers
4. Any particular platform (web, mobile) to focus on? YES, Web-only
User Personas
1. Students (and family) with poor computer skills: Nina the non-techie student
2. Students (and family) with slow internet, old computers, Turtle the student with slow internet
3. Older Teachers who are intimidated by tech. Nigel the non technical teacher.
4. Tech Savvy Teacher: Tina the Techie Teacher
5. Tech Savvy Student: Sam the Savvy STudent
Pain points that Teachers and students have expressed about Zom.
1. Logins & Passwords
2. Users with computer & browser issues (viruses, slow, etc.)
3. Users with slow internet or slow computers
4. Need for secure connections for legal/regulatory reasons.
5. Teachers have complained about current system:
  1. There's a lot of friction around student participation. Students talk over each other or their mic gets disabled.
  2. Teachers find it harder to keep students engaged because they are not in the physical classroom. Students are easily distracted by their environment (their cat walking across keyboard, etc.)
  3. In discussing with teachers, discover the above is caused by:
    1. Students can't find Mute/Unmute button
    2. Many students don't know how to use Raise Hand
    3. When multiple students Raise Hand icon, teacher loses track of the order and students get impatient and often "skip the line" and just interrupt, or give up. Once teacher "calls" on them, they've sometimes forgotten their question.
    4. Hard to know when they've "lost" a student who isn't participating.
Use Cases
1. Live Instruction : Teacher teaching a live class remotely.
  1. Video : everyone sees everyone.
  2. Share Teacher's screen
2. During Live Instruction: Engage all students in a way that puts the work on them not the teacher, and lets the teacher easily monitor what's going on. (Vs. having to individually help each student with their mic or how to raise their hand.)
3. Learn Skype: learn enough to be a participant (Students) in 5m and a Presenter (Teacher) in 30m
Observations
1. Video and screen sharing is a commodity these days. It's "table stakes". These are "well served" by competition.
2. I'll focus only on 4.5 above (Teacher complaints). The other Problems ( 4.1-4.4, above) is beyond the scope of a small team. Also, Zoom does at least as well as competing services (and often better in my 200+ zoom sessions).
3. Managing a class of 35 kids remotely is a challenge if you have to attend to each one individually. I'm going to focus on on that by empowering the teacher to keep the students engaged.
Pain Point I'm solving for: Keeping Students engaged
Desired Outcomes and Features to achieve them.
1. Engage students
  Easy to use Poll feature so teacher can give students little mini assignments to keep them occupied and engaged. . She can have pre-prepared Polls in case she needs a 5 minute break to help a student. She can visually see which students are answering the poll, and which ones got it right or not.
  1. Future features:
    1. Ability to do breakout rooms by Poll Answer. This lets teacher organize students by their answer. So she might put all the kids who got it right into a room to play a game while she works with the students that got it wrong.
    2. Raised Hand icon shows a # for what order they raised their hand in, so teacher can answer questions in order. This reduces the chance of students getting frustrated because they weren't called on, and just interrupting.
2. Minimize Training Time
  1. Make the critical buttons easy to find and provide logical hotkeys.
    Make Space Bar a "push to talk" button
  2. Create automated "get started" exercise to quickly teach students the basics of the system. Teacher can see which student have done this assignment.
    1. How to Raise Hand
    2. Answer Poll
    3. Mute/Unmute Mic
Confirm our assumptions above (Use Cases, Pain Points, etc.) with teachers and students, perhaps wit UX testing.
Prototype
1. I'd sketch a screen.( Sorry my handwriting is rough)
Prioritize (via MoSCoW method)
1. Must have: Video conferencing with audio, and screensharing.
2. Must Have: Good UX for the critical buttons (raise hand etc.) is top priority. And it's an easy win. Reduces training time and lowers friction
3. Should Have:Easier Polls - this helps with student engagement. We can also try using this for the "get started" exercise. Could also try different versions of this "get started" for different teachers to see which one works best.
4. Could Have (lower priority) :
  1. Divide students into Break-out rooms by Poll Anwer. (All students who answered #1, got to room 1, all who answered #2, goto room 2, etc.)
  2. Raised Hand icon shows the # for what order they raised hand.
UX goals
1. Teacher Can find Create Poll button.
2. Everyone Can find RAISE HAND button.
3. Everyone can answer POLL
4. Teacher can tell how many and which students gave each answer to Poll (e.g., Bobby answered #3, 30% of class answered #3)
Measurement
1. App tracks these metrics:
  1. Student used feature. Value is # of days since first class with teacher.
    1. E.g., Student Used RaiseHand:2 (raised their hand within 2 days of first class)
  2. Same for teacher.
  3. Features measured
    1. Teacher:
      1. Went to screen for Creating a Poll.
      2. Created poll
      3. Gave poll to class
    2. Students
      1. Raised hand
        Note: some may simply choose not to raise hand.
      2. Answered Poll (measured from first time they were given a Poll)
2. OKRs
  1. Outcome: Teachers discover and use Polls while teaching with zoom.
    Key Result Measurement goals:
    1. 90% of Teacher discover Poll in first 2 weeks after first login.
    2. 70% of teachers create a simple poll
      Assume we discovered the 90% of teachers love the poll feature and will use it)
    3. Teacher can see what order students raised hand.
      1. 90% of teachers understand what order the hands were raised within 2 days of first class
    4. Teacher can divide class into Breakout Rooms by Poll answer
      1. 90% of teachers who want to use this can do so within first 2 weeks of class.
  2. Outcome: Students can anwer poll
    1. KR': 100% of students can use the poll correctly in the first 2 weeks after first class.
Based on results "in the field" we may find we need to alert Teachers to Poll feature or have a more formal "automated training" for some or all of these (especially for the students).

Clay Nichols · Answer 3 · 2022-04-09T23:35:38+0000

Clarify
1. Zoom is a service for video conferencing and screen sharing, right? YES
2. What levels of Education? 9-12 (high school)
3. Who is the customer? Who is the user? School District, teachers & students
4. What are the goals of the School District? They want to minimizetraining of teachers and students.
  They want all teachers and all students using the system within 1 month of rollout with less than 2 hours of training for the Teachers and 15minutes of training for the students.
Constraints
1. What's our budget? You have 6 months and 5 Devs, 1 UX, 1 Tester
2. Can we use the core zoom features but have complete control over UI? YES
3. Any other constraints like requirements from School District? No. School District just wants to :
  1. minimize cost & training
  2. Satisfy teachers
4. Any particular platform (web, mobile) to focus on? YES, Web-only
User Personas
1. Students (and family) with poor computer skills
2. Students (and family) with slow internet, old computers
3. Older Teachers who are intimidated by tech.
Pain points
1. Logins & Passwords
2. Users with computer & browser issues (viruses, slow, etc.)
3. Users with slow internet or slow computers
4. Need for secure connections for legal/regulatory reasons.
5. Teachers have complained about current system:
  1. There's a lot of friction around student participation. Students talk over each other or their mic gets disabled.
  2. Teachers find it harder to keep students engaged because they are not in the physical classroom. Students are easily distracted by their environment (their cat walking across keyboard, etc.)
  3. In discussing with teachers, discover the above is caused by:
  4. Students can't find Mute/Unmute button
  5. Many students don't know how to use Raise Hand
  6. When multiple students Raise Hand icon, teacher loses track of the order and students get impatient.
  7. Hard to know when they've "lost" a student who isn't participating.
Use Cases
1. Live Instruction : Teacher teaching a live class remotely.
  1. Video : everyone sees everyone.
  2. Share Teacher's screen
2. Learn to be a participant in 15m and a Presenter in 2h
3. Engage all students in a way that puts the work on them not the teacher, and lets the teacher easily monitor what's going on. (Vs. having to individually help each student with their mic or how to raise their hand.)
Observations
1. Video and screen sharing is a commodity these days. It's table stakes.
2. Managing a class of 35 kids remotely is a challenge if you have to attend to each one. I'm going to focus on on that by empowering the teacher to keep the students engaged.
SOLUTIONS
1. Engage students
  Easy to use Poll feature so teacher can give students little mini assignments to keep them occupied and engaged. . She can have pre-prepared Polls in case she needs a 5 minute break to help a student. She can visually see which students are answering the poll, and which ones got it right or not.
2. Future features:
  1. Ability to do breakout rooms by Poll Answer. This lets teacher organize students by their answer. So she might put all the kids who got it right into a room to play a game while she works with the students that got it wrong.
  2. Raised Hand icon shows a # for what order they raised their hand in.
3. Minimize Training Time
  1. Make the critical buttons easy to find and provide logical hotkeys.
    Make Space Bar a "push to talk" button
  2. Create automated "get started" exercise to quickly teach students the basics of the system. Teacher can see which student have done this assignment.
    1. How to Raise Hand
    2. Answer Poll
    3. Mute/Unmute Mic
Confirm our assumptions above (Use Cases, Pain Points, etc.) with teachers and students.
Prototype
1. I'd sketch a screen.( Sorry my handwriting is rough)
Prioritize
1. Good UX for the critical buttons (raise hand etc.) is top priority. And it's an easy win. Reduces training time and lowers friction
2. Easier Polls - this helps with student engagement. We can also try using this for the "get started" exercise. Could also try different versions of this "get started" for different teachers to see which one works best.
UX goals
1. Teacher Can find Create Poll button.
2. Everyone Can find RAISE HAND button.
3. Everyone can answer POLL
4. Teacher can tell how many and which students gave each answer to Poll (e.g., Bobby answered #3, 30% of class answered #3)
Measurement
1. App tracks these metrics:
  1. Student used feature. Value is # of days since first class with teacher.
  2. Same for teacher.
  3. Features measured
    1. Teacher:
      1. Went to screen for Creating a Poll.
      2. Created poll
      3. Gave poll to class
    2. Students
      1. Raised hand
        Note: some may simply choose not to raise hand.
      2. Answered Poll (measured from first time they were given a Poll)
2. OKRs
  1. Teachers discover and use Polls while teaching with zoom.
    Key Result Measurement goals:
    1. 90% of Teacher discover Poll in first 2 weeks after first login.
    2. 70% of teachers create a simple poll
      Assume we discovered the 90% of teachers love the poll feature and will use it)
  2. 100% of students can use the poll correctly in the first 2 weeks after first class.
Based on results "in the field" we may find we need to alert Teachers to Poll feature or have a more formal "automated training" for some or all of these (especially for the students).