How interest in colleagues' work helped me successfully launch a new feature at VK Calls
*online video conferencing service
Years
2022-2023
Role
Product Designer
Imagine you're a product designer at VK,
a large Russian social network with 100 million MAU.
One day, a manager from another project desperately asks for your help. The nuance is that nobody can onboard you.
A challenge, huh? Are you gonna take it?
VK Calls
VK Video
VK ecosystem
What am I dealing with?
The project asking for help is VK Calls,
an online conferencing service
It’s a part of VK social network. The number of monthly active users is 20 million. It’s fast and completely free, but many users of VK were still not familiar with it.
The goal is to increase the group calls
Business wasn’t satisfied with VK Calls' performance and wanted to attract new users to boost group calls through online lessons.
Cross-functional team
Project managers, developers, analysts, UX researchers
Business:
wants to increase the number of audience
and group calls
Team:
thinks a new designer won’t understand product complicity
Users:
prefer other platforms, even ready to pay for subscription
Together with the UX researchers, we interviewed teachers. Why teachers? They conduct lessons online — it’s a great opportunity to raise VK Calls’ group calls.
Teachers
Want to split participants into smaller
groups for collaborative work
Students
Want to practice their new knowledge more during a lesson
Insight
Teachers
need a break!
a break!
Breakout rooms
A feature that will allow call administrators to split participants into small groups to practice
Brainstorming how should
Breakout rooms work
With our findings in hand, I organized a brainstorming session to prioritize the key functions for the first release.
We needed to concentrate on what’s was crucial to create a smooth experience for both administrators and participants, and at the same time make sure that all the features won’t cause difficulties during the development.
Creating user flows
How can we make the distribution of call participants fast and easy?
My first design concept aimed to be simple and user-friendly. However, user testing showed that it wasn’t.
User tests helped to shape
a better version of the flow
Determined to improve, I developed a new solution that allowed administrators to assign participants to multiple rooms in a single window. This was a game-changer, significantly reducing the number of clicks and saving valuable time.
VK Calls team:
“We're concerned it will take time for you to get up to speed with the product”
Dealing with professional distrust is stressful.
What helped me?
By the time I joined the project, I already knew a lot about their technical constraints, failures and successes, team processes. And all these I got just by listening and paying attention to what my colleagues say.
Exploring projects
in Figma
Being interested
not only in visuals, but in reasons, process and results
Talking
to other
designers
on design reviews
Paying attention
Asking PM
about other projects
Painfully long implementation
The development process was divided into three phases, stretching
over several months due to resource constraints. I kept in constant touch with the development teams, conducting reviews and providing solutions for unexpected technical issues, and at the same time was working with my original VK Video team.
Results
6
main user
scenarios
300
web & mobile screens
250
daily active users (DAU)
4500
monthly active users (MAU)
Key takeaways
Stay updated
It's important to stay in the loop with other teams at your company. It makes transitions smoother and allows you to reuse their successful solutions.
Validate solutions early
Testing various concepts from the start helps make informed decisions. User feedback is invaluable.
Some features take time
This project was a lesson in patience, iterative design, and adapting to new requirements and technical limitations.
Rooms overivew
Creating rooms
Managing rooms
