Experiences Need To Evolve Fast
Video conferencing just isn’t good enough - yet.
As social isolation rules drive us to find new ways to connect, our entire society has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a mass user-trial of video-conferencing technology. No matter how long we need to maintain physical distancing, the novelty ‘early adopter’ days are over.
The big question is, who will come to dominate a market that is maturing at lightspeed?
The new users who control the future of this market are the many millions of people who aren’t very good with tech, who have been disappointed to miss out on family gatherings because they can’t connect, been embarrassed in front of others by camera/audio failures or who have simply grown tired of staring at a loved one’s earlobe.
Video calling has mattered for a long time to separated families and teams collaborating over long distances. The Alloy team has family, clients and development partners all over the world so we have been early adopters and frequent users. The cool thing about video calling is that every call is a ‘deep dive’ user trial we get to observe. We have also been professionally involved in many extensive video communication user-trials with older consumers. We have been monitoring the explosion of press articles and raw consumer data from the COVID-19 tracker survey being run by market research first Rare Consulting.
From this insight collection, two things are clear:
1) Video does matter more. It is propping up social and commercial connections at a critical time, and hey, it’s mostly free. In a post COVID-19 world, these new habits will stick and will probably enable big lasting changes to where people choose to live and work.
2) But the bottom line is that video experiences aren’t anywhere near good enough yet. The big unanswered questions are who will stay and will they pay?
Based on present evidence, fewer will stay and pay than platforms hope. Not since 3G in the early 2000s has there been as big a disconnect between the experience quality people expect and what the tech world thinks is OK. Those with good memories will recall a Nokia dominated world in which communication was accessed using small-screen menus navigated using a 4 way button + 2 soft keys and a 12 button alpha-numeric keypad.. We have some hilarious ‘expletive deleted’ user videos in our archive!
We all know what happened next. It’s called the iPhone. Just like then, better experiences will drive enduring market leadership.
So what needs to get better? Here is our top hit list:
· Simpler participation.
All over the world, millions of people have wasted hours talking elderly relatives through the process of signing up in order to FaceTime one set of kids, Skype the others and Zoom a virtual Sunday lunch. Plenty have given up. It takes too many clicks in too many places to join most platforms. Not exactly Amazon ‘1-click’.
· More inclusive UX design
This isn’t just about big buttons and fonts. The problem is UX design that puts such a premium on a clean, uncluttered picture that call controls are ‘discoverable’ means that one has to know they are there, and know that one needs to touch the screen to make them visible. A nice on-screen behaviour to maximise the viewing area to those who know how to use it , but totally foreign to the other half of humankind. New icons aren’t yet so culturally embedded that no words are needed. Hands up all those who have needed to shout “it’s the one with the white square next to the white triangle on a blue square, no not the green one!”.
· A better quality picture
We don’t just mean ‘quality’ in the sense of screen resolution and refresh rate. When video calls graduate from novelties to job interviews and conversations with loved ones, the art direction of the picture matters a whole lot more; lighting and camera position in particular. Despite noble AI-based attempts to digitally ‘spruce up’ appearance, if the lighting is from below or into the camera, even the best algorithms struggle. Likewise, built-in cameras may be cheap and convenient, but who wants the world looking up at their chin from a propped up mobile phone? Better ‘composition’ solutions will prosper.
· Smarter control, closer to sociology and commerce
How we socialise, where, when, and with who, is a rich tapestry that has evolved over millennia. People will want fundamentally different ‘environments’ for family chats compared to, say, team brainstorms, but also won’t want a proliferation of platforms in their lives. The mass market will need more UX diversity - a way to adapt what they’re interacting with on-screen based on their individual user needs and, more importantly, their tech fluency.
· Security & Clarity
The Zoom ‘hero to shareholder lawsuit’ business case is finally waking up the world to the critical importance of security. The problems have been evident to professionals for a long time, it’s a key reason Skype wasn’t approved for healthcare. But ‘free’ is tempting and when the business model is really about harvesting data and the call is just a marketing hook no one should be surprised calls are routed through dodgy servers or that ‘zoombombing’ is a new ‘word of the year’. The mass-market will pay to be secure and private. Just not much.
What the mass market wants is to get as close as possible to seamless ‘tele-presence’, with all the richness and personal control which that entails. There are rich pickings for anyone who makes a dent in our top five to-do list.