Hey kids - say you wanted to run/facilitate interactive sessions (e.g. group user research) as part of a day's program with 200 Zoom attendees.

What works? What doesn't? How many people do you need? What size groups? Is it going to be too difficult?

Update:

We didn’t do any breakouts.
We did 3 facilitated massively multiplayer Miro sessions with ~180 real-time participants.

Two with specific questions prompting stickies-on-the-wall, one for dot voting against specific propositions.

We were worried about low/zero familiarity with Miro, so a few days beforehand we included in a pre-survey a simple Miro task: "add your favorite food to this board", with some instructions / screenshots on how to do it.

We probably had about ~40-50% of the 200 attendees contribute a favorite food before the session started, which I think is a pretty reasonable achievement.

Also, disconfirmed our suspicions!

What we learned:

A major problem with low Miro familiarity was people not knowing how to zoom in/out or move the viewport around. All of the stickies piled up in a central area and on top of each other.

Very few users seemed able to resize or move their stickies.

What we'd do/try next time:

1) Lay out the boards better
2) Figure out ways to prompt people to spread stickies around more
3) Perhaps include moving around, zooming in/out in the prep exercise to familiarise people with the tool more

4) 100+ mouse cursors is super distracting. People felt a lot better once we realized you could turn them off and concentrate on adding your own sticky. We didn't think about this beforehand. (I thought it would be interesting for people to see what others were doing)

Also: I didn't have time to set up virtual cameras and compositing a la OBS because our state was/is on fire. So I tried Zoom's new Slides as Virtual Background feature - here's some screenshots.

It's interesting how this works, but it's kinda janky (it's in beta!)

How it works:

1. Zoom filepicker lets you choose a Keynote or PowerPoint file
2. Zoom controls Keynote/PowerPoint and uses it to export a rendered PDF of the presentation to use as virtual backgrounds
3. In-Zoom controls allow you to select prev/next from the PDF renders

Implications:

You can't quickly flip to sharing another window/screen and then flip quickly *back* to the composited virtual background presentation. Zoom needs to re-render the entire thing all over again. No caching, reasonable for a beta!

Also, no gallery/light table view of all the slides, so you need to page through one by one if you want to skip around your slides. But! Definitely let me do it without figuring out virtual cameras and OBS and everything.

If you're following, a great writeup from @rachelginsberg on what their team learned facilitating sessions like this at Cooper Hewitt's interaction lab. https://twitter.com/rachelginsberg/status/1306278700774809600?s=20

Also this from @kwing: https://twitter.com/kwing/status/1306303448573382656?s=20