Screen Sharing: A Problem
Imagine this. You’re presenting a project you’ve worked long and hard for to your peers and teacher. You happen to be presenting this project by projecting your laptop’s screen onto the conference room’s projector screen. As you delve deeper into the meat of your presentation, you hear a ding. Where could this be coming from? You look around to try to find the source of this ding. This search for the ding concludes, but to no avail. You look at the screen and all you can see is the gleaming blue of an iMessage notification. It’s a message from your best friend sharing a wild night that she had the last night. OH NO. You suddenly feel like your presentation has suddenly become an inferior supplement to your iMessage conversation with your best friend. Your audience has become more interested in your friend’s wild night than your presentation.
What an embarrassing situation!
There is no doubt that this situation could be shared by many other people when tackling the task of screen sharing.
Now, what exactly is screen sharing you ask?
Screen Sharing is a way of remotely accessing and collaborating on person’s computer desktop screen.
You’ve probably heard of screen sharing more often now than ever due to the universal shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to its conspicuous relevance, my group and I have decided to research and design the screen sharing interface to better the experience of its users, which have increased substantially in a time like now.
In fact, consider this statistic: Zoom, a popular video conferencing application, has reached a number of “10 million to over 200 million” users in 3 months due to this shift to virtual conferences.
But with a larger audience, interfaces like Zoom have been given an enormous amount of power over the professional and academic lives that people use Zoom as a vessel for.
It seems appropriate enough to reiterate the wise words of Stan Lee,
“With great power comes great responsibility”
I aim to better the screen sharing interface to reflect the needs of users that come from a wide range of technical backgrounds. In other words, with millions of users to account for, we can predict that many more users will be using screen sharing services from free accounts and non-professional use. Video conferencing before the surge of new users was usually thought to be the tool of businesspeople, professionals, and others that could likely be technically acclimated to the conceptual models of screen sharing interfaces. But with more free accounts, we can expect many unique, new users that are completely naive to the idea of using applications like Zoom.
So, what specifically is the user need?
User Needs
We can expect screen sharing platforms to be used by teachers to host live lectures, by students to share their assignments with classmates, by programmers to share their code with coworkers, and even by medical professionals to share patient records for work meetings.
It is evident that many kinds of users can be expected to use interfaces like Zoom to share their contributions.
These are a few examples, of students’ experiences with screen sharing platforms:
“My teacher usually has a hard and long time figuring out how to use Zoom lol”
“In class today, we saw someone go to the bathroom. WE SAW EVERYTHING.”
“It’s awkward sometimes. My teacher accidentally showed another student’s grades while sharing his screen.”
“This isn’t really in a class setting, but I was watching Game of Thrones and was going to connect my laptop to another monitor screen I have. I unlocked my screen with my laptop screen already displayed and it showed this really steamy scene that I had paused on in a GOT episode. I can’t imagine how embarrassing I would have been if I did this in public on a huger monitor screen yikes.”
As you can see, there are a multitude of scenarios with screen sharing platforms that have provoked feelings of violated privacy and confusion with navigating Zoom. These scenarios also expose a few nuances of the problem of violated privacy through the use of applications like Zoom. People end up accidentally sharing more of their screen than intended. Or people have hard time learning the conceptual mode of a screen sharing platform’s capabilities. When considering the act of screen sharing, we also have to consider the video conferencing aspect of screen sharing. Who will you be sharing your screen with? You will be sharing your screen with other members of the video conference you are engaging with. So, naturally, the whole experience of screen sharing includes conferencing with other individuals by face and/or voice. This experience is usually formatted in the fashion of this generic snapshot of a video call below:
When thinking of a screen sharing interface, you may ask why scenarios of people accidentally going to the bathroom during a call may be relevant. This is why! Screen sharing is also encompassing of the experiencing calling people through video.
Through these experiences, we can see that screen sharing tends to the need of:
Appropriately sharing your screen to express your worthy contribution to a virtual discourse.
So, what are current screen sharing platforms doing to violate this need?
Existing Systems
Zoom is a popular screen sharing platform that also doubles as a video conferencing platform. When sharing your screen, you are prompted with the screen below:
This is a clear interface, indicating users to pick what screen they would like to share. This provides the appropriate transparency of information to let users be aware of what screen they will end up sharing. This can mitigate invasions of privacy when sharing a person’s entire screen — which may expose personal things on their desktop.
The similar interface is used through iMessage’s Buddies tab which allows a person to share their screen through iMessage.
This feature of Zoom has been met with several instances of controversy, such as the form of internet trolling that has taken form through “Zoombombing”. It is essentially the act of a random person joining a call and sharing their screen that is filled with inappropriate images/videos. This problem forces hosts to rapidly find a solution to block the user from sharing their screen. This scenario could also be seen in times where the feature of “annotating” goes haywire. When sharing a screen, other people in the conference call can annotate the screen (or in other words, doodle).
This control of actually changing the screen that is shared can also expose some inefficiencies in Zoom mediating permissions in a conference call.
But with an interface that requires the user to peruse through several screens of system preferences, more damage can be done by the troll in this time of panic. This falls on the shoulders of what settings are available to users but also what settings are obvious to users. When observing this situation through the lens of a teacher persona, it is tough to predict how much time they would dedicate to learning Zoom’s conceptual model (where all of the settings are, etc.). That isn’t the teacher’s job.
Another insufficient feature that Zoom falls short of is allowing users to handle external disturbances that may occur when sharing their screen. Regardless of what screen they may share, notifications like iMessage can show up.
What About Professional Environments?
With knowledge of these shortcomings of Zoom, we can extend the conversation to other environments that have a more urgent need of privacy. For example, there is no standardized system for medical professionals to use during video conferencing when accessing private patient data. The existing systems in place are mainly physical barriers that prevent unwanted screen viewing. In situations like this, privacy becomes a grander problem.
Moving Forward
With the inefficiencies, of screen sharing platforms outlined, the next step is to design, prototype, and report our findings!
My group and I aim to design an interface that reflects the privacies of a certain persona: a medical professional. As discussed above, the setting of a video call can alter the amount of privacy expected. This makes occurrences of Zoombombing and other forms of internet trolling unacceptable and a serious violation of medical laws.
Some goals of medical users could include:
- Discussing medical records
- Live stream medical training
- Consulting with patients, medical diagnosis
- Online Healthcare
Through the dissection of designing for this particular user, we hope to reveal some design decisions that could reflect diverse experiences of maintaining privacy in this digital world.
