Hi, I'm looking to hear thoughts and ideas from anyone designing for / facilitating sessions with Zoom please. Following the new version rolled out towards end of December (5.4.7) there have been some changes to the 'Non-verbal feedback' and 'Reactions' functionality. I can see the benefits of combining the 2 areas to go from a UX point of view, but feel that there are 2 implications for how we facilitate virtual training sessions....

1) green ticks / red crosses automatically clear themselves after 10 seconds. This can make those regular check-ins that we like to do difficult to manage, as the early responders ticks may have disappeared by the time that the slower responders have provided theirs. It makes it difficult to have full confidence that you've had a 100% response rate.

2) there is no longer a coffee cup and clock available, these were both great ways for delegates to signal their temporary absence from the session. I guess we can substitute these with the chat function (asking delegates to pop a comment into chat if away from desk) but again, it's not as convenient and with a busy chat window we could soon lose sight of this info.

How are other people getting on since these changes were rolled out to Zoom? Really interested to hear of your experiences and ideas and new best practice in light of them.

Thanks! : )

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  • Hi Duncan,

    I will have to check those changes out. If it is indeed now mandatory that it works that way then I can see that be annoying for learning but also just generally for webinars also.

    10 seconds is not enough leeway for this. I can easliy see points where you would want to reference back to these and then they are gone. I hope this is a tick on and off option!

    Removing of the away icons I guess it to adhere to the emoticon changes. Again this seems backwards to me.

    My inital thinking moving forward with this.

    If you have a situation where you want a green tick or red cross and no you want to have a discussion around this and refer back to what people have selected. I think a slide where the attendees will annotate would now need to happen. Put your name on the green side or red side, or put your name next to the statement you agree with. keeps it visual on the slide for as long as you need it.

    Regarding the away and coffee cup icon. I think I might try and get my attendees to change name if they need to go for a bit. Perhaps get them to change to 'zAWAY Name'. This way theey appear at the bottom of the list and it is clear they are away.

    Those are my first thoughts!

    • Thanks for following up Michael, good to hear from you.  

      I've had a look in settings under "Non-verbal feedback" and "Reactions" and there's the following text that suggests the time limit is backed in... "Allow meeting participants to communicate without interrupting by clicking on icons (e.g. yes, no, go slower). These icons are found in the Reactions menu in the toolbar, and when selected, they display on the participant's video and in the participants list for 10 seconds."

      Good suggestions there around potential replacements.  The annotation approach would definitely work and could be designed in, it's just a shame that we seem to have lost the spontaneity for getting those confirmations along the way.  I guess we can use the chat window for those ad-hoc check ins.  


      I like the idea of renaming in lieu of the away icons, that could work.

      Thanks again, look forward to hearing anything else you / others think of or have put in place : )

  • Good news on this one, if anyone else agrees that the changes to the green ticks / red crosses thing is a bit of an issue!

    There's going to be a Zoom update on Monday of next week (1st Feb) and the latest version of the app will revert back to giving the host control of this i.e. they icons will persist until you clear them down, the 10 second time limit will be removed : )

    • Amazing!!! Thank you for keeping us informed Duncan :)

    • Oh Duncan such good news! The sessions we've run with that change were really challenging all round. Phew :D 

    • phew indeed !

  • Some further good news on this one in the latest Zoom update...the 'Reactions' panel now includes an icon of a coffee cup with the text "I'm away" to make it really clear what it means.  It also persists until it's toggled off.  The whole process of remembering who is taking a comfort break is suddenly alot easier again : )

    • It's amazing how much difference such a seemingly small detail can make to a virtual facilitator!

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