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📚Case study on Zoom

As of 2025, at least 10,000 educational institutions use Zoom for Education. While Zoom is one of the most used video conference tools in the market, educators and students still face challenges.

Taking Zoom's business goals into consideration, Zoom is focusing on driving adoption and increasing market share in the education sector. Revenue "uplift" and platform adoption are the key financial goals for the upcoming business days.

🧩Problem Statement

Many educators, students, and small institutions use Zoom for live classes but still rely on external tools to share assignments, track progress, and communicate, creating an inefficient, fragmented workflow. Because users often enter Zoom only for the meeting itself, they never discover or adopt Zoom’s existing Chat, Docs, or Calendar features.

By reducing friction in instant meeting access, Zoom has a strong opportunity to become the default daily tool for small educators, driving repeated use, increasing discovery of Zoom’s wider features, and naturally growing adoption of the broader Zoom ecosystem.

💡Identified Issue: Zoom’s Instant-Join Flow Is Creating Unintended Friction

Through interviews and surveys, I found that small institutes, tutors, and independent coaches frequently avoid Zoom and prefer Google Meet, even though Zoom offers a far richer suite of tools (Chat, Docs, Calendar, Notes, Whiteboard, Clips).

🌀What Exactly Happens in Zoom’s Join Flow?

When a student or participant clicks a Zoom meeting link

Although user has the app downloaded, Zoom meeting links typically open in a web browser first because the link is a standard URL

Default screen of join meet.png

  • The primary CTA forces the user to download the Zoom app

  • The option to “Join from Browser” is minimized, or we can say, probably hidden underneath

  • The UX is clearly optimized toward app downloads, not accessibility

  • Many users interpret this as a dark pattern, because the easier, faster option is intentionally concealed

😶‍🌫️Why is Zoom doing this? (The strategy)

Zoom is competing directly with:​

  • Google ecosystem

  • Microsoft Teams ecosystem

Both offer a tight browser-based experience + fully integrated workspace.

Zoom’s long-term strategy is to build the Zoom Workplace ecosystem (Chat, Docs, Calendar, Mail, Notes, Whiteboard). To achieve this, Zoom needs:

Secondary Goal:

Zoom’s long-term strategy is to build the Zoom Workplace ecosystem (Chat, Docs, Calendar, Mail, Notes, Whiteboard). To achieve this, Zoom needs:

✔️ More Zoom app downloads to increase daily active users inside the ecosystem.

But that is leading to a contradiction.

🧐The Conflict Zoom Created

Zoom’s primary business goal is to

→ Increase user adoption and long-term retention.

Its secondary internal goal is:

→ Increase app downloads and ecosystem lock-in.

The current join-flow prioritizes the secondary goal.

But the consequence?

  • Users feel pushed

  • Independent teachers churn to Google Meet

  • Students drop off

  • Small institutes avoid Zoom for quick sessions

  • People never discover the integrated features (Chat, Docs, Whiteboards, etc.)

90% of the users interviewed had NO idea that Zoom has Docs, Chat, Calendar, and Notes.

Because they never see these features, they drop off before reaching the Zoom app.

🤔Critical Question

How can Zoom encourage app downloads without blocking instant access?

AND

How can Zoom use the join screen to increase feature awareness rather than create friction?

👉Suggested Shift

Instead of hiding “Join from Browser,” Zoom could:

1️⃣ Keep instant access open and accessible

2️⃣ Use the join page to show value, not force behavior

For example, Something like this

Redesigned screen of join meet.png

  • “Did you know Zoom also has Chat, Docs & Calendar?”

  • Quick previews

  • One-click “Join from Browser”

  • Subtle encouragement instead of forcing downloads

This solves both goals:

Primary Goal: Adoption increases

More people successfully join → more people use Zoom → more people stay.

Secondary Goal: Downloads eventually increase

When users actually see the value of Zoom Workplace (Chat, Docs, Calendar), they are more likely to download voluntarily.

💎Value That Can Be Increased for Zoom

Solving this problem increases daily use, boosts feature adoption, supports Zoom’s strategic goals, and unlocks a large untapped segment of small educators and coaches who need simple, fast, everyday teaching tools.

📱How it can look in the Mobile Version

Redesigned screen of join meet Mobile PNG.png

🧑‍🦰Personas

By clustering users based on similar behaviours, motivations, and pain points, these three personas naturally emerged as the core segments most affected by Zoom’s current limitations

Persona 1.png
Persona 2.png
Persona 3.png

📌User Journey Map

To understand where Zoom’s fragmented workflow creates friction, I mapped the end-to-end journey of each persona, from starting a class/interview to managing assignments and communication afterward. These journeys were built using insights from interviews, survey responses, and direct observation of how teachers, students, and instructors currently juggle multiple tools.

User journey map.png
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