I started at VQ Communications in March and although I’d previously experienced working with a global technology company I was excited to join a company where there is a focus on ‘big’. For our conferencing management software, this means staying ahead of our clients who already have some of the largest deployments of video and audio conferencing, based on the CMS platform. This focus on scale has both tactical and strategic implications for UX.
UX needs to use design patterns for filtering, sorting and searching that are resilient to large volumes of meeting and calls data. Scale creates challenges that are usually only revealed when talking to users. For example, users often leave the default call name, making auto-complete search tricky when there are hundreds of calls all called ‘New Call’. Email search patterns provided a useful starting place for the challenges of volume searches.
One client now makes approximately one million minutes of video and audio conference calls a day. Volume on this size is exciting for UX as it means finding new ways to reveal the most important aspects of the data so that operators, can view both correct and meaningful data they require to monitor and support growing amounts of calls– quite a challenge. Acano Manager 2.0 had already introduced the idea of Dashboards and Analytics long before I joined. So now it’s interesting to start to think about some daily monitoring tools that support user goals moving from managing individual meetings to monitoring hundreds or even thousands of meetings.
What’s next? Well, I’ve barely scratched the surface in understanding the UX challenges and opportunities that ‘big’ brings. But I’m excited about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with conference management. More from me again in the coming months as I continue on this exciting UX journey.
If you’re technically minded and interested in the path to big, read our CEO’s blog ‘The path to big’, where he talks about how we use Microsoft’s open source software platform to increase the resilience of the Acano Manager software.