Bringing together virtually disconnected teams.
Humans feel disconnected on Zoom calls.
The world had changed overnight. Pre-pandemic, only a fraction of jobs were remote or hybrid. By 2020, distributed work had become the norm. Productivity held steady, but team connection was lost. Colleagues no longer bumped into each other, shared casual conversations, or felt the same energy of a buzzing office. So how do we restore human connection in a hybrid world? That was the problem Zoom Huddles I set out to solve.
"We run a Zoom session for 24 hours every day, creating a virtual workspace where we can all collaborate. It's set up like office hours, allowing anyone from our community to join at any time that suits them."
Participant 11
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Video Editor
"It’s draining to stare at a grid of faces all day. To cope, my team uses emojis and gifs in chat to lighten the mood and bring back some personality."
Participant 3
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sales associate
Exploring what is out there
I began by mapping the landscape. I created a detailed Google Sheet that captured competitor products, their features, pricing, branding, distribution, and customer feedback. To make it real, I recruited interns from across Zoom to test these tools firsthand.
Through this exercise, I saw patterns. What competitors got right, where they fell short, and the usability pitfalls we had to avoid. It also revealed emerging trends we could get ahead of, grounding our strategy in real evidence.
How do groups form in real life?
Competitive research wasn’t enough. We needed to understand the human side of connection. Over three days, during lunch breaks at the Zoom HQ, I conducted an ethnography of how employees naturally formed groups.
I watched how people drifted into conversations, how cliques formed, how body language and facial expressions quietly signaled “you belong” or “this is closed.” These observations uncovered unspoken rules of human interaction and they became the foundation for recreating authentic, organic connections in a virtual space.
If Huddles were to succeed, they had to align with how people already behaved, not force them into unnatural patterns.
Design exploration
I sketched out a few versions. Quick, messy, exploratory. They helped me visualize ideas rapidly. How to group departments, how avatars might cluster, how conversations could spark naturally. For enterprise customers, this meant solving for thousands of people without losing the intimacy of small groups.
Prototyping the experience
Moving into Figma, I translated sketches into low-fidelity prototypes that mapped the Huddles flow. Integration with Zoom Meetings and Chat was crucial, it needed to feel seamless, not like an add-on. By working closely with a Senior Design Technologist, I quickly iterated prototypes, tested with leadership, and refined designs into actionable recommendations.
We visually represented department as 'Spaces', personalized to the users prior collaboration. The avatars provided a quick overview of which of their colleagues were "in the office". Private rooms were required a knock to be let in versus others were open to enter without any wait.
A user could enter a 'Space' without immediately joining the conversation, similar to working at your desk while colleagues discuss work nearby. If desired, you could easily become part of a huddle (represented on the right).
These huddles were where you could chat, share screen, and whiteboard together in smaller groups.
Users can minimize their Huddle view into a sidebar to get in and out of the experience depending on their work needs.
A new experience that made a huge impact
We launched the first version of Zoom Huddles at Zoomtopia. It was both exhilarating and humbling. On one hand, we had created something entirely new, rooted in deep research and customer feedback. For me, Huddles was a masterclass in the realities of innovation and launching a new product end-to-end.