Isn’t the ultimate best signup experience, when you don’t need to sign up at all?
I use Doodle to schedule activities with my friends, because Doodle is super simple to use. You assemble a list of options and then share a secret link with your friends. That’s all you need to find out which time slots work for everyone.
Compare that to almost any other calendar scheduling service, where you’re greeted with a login wall. Some of the services don’t even tell us what they do before asking us to sign up.
These two options are the digital world equivalent of approaching a castle with either,
- A massive moat and the drawbridge all the way up, or a
- Red carpet nicely rolled out for the guests, and maybe even someone nice guiding them in.
This year we’ve seen people starting to use the verb “zooming” instead of “skypeing” when referring to video calling someone. “Let’s have a Skype call” has been replaced by “I’ll send you a Zoom link” and it’s for a good reason.
It’s still quite fiddly to send someone a working Skype link: you can only do it from within the Skype app, and the recipient too needs a Skype account with the application downloaded. But it’s two clicks to send someone a Zoom link, which allows anyone to join in and chat away in seconds — even in a browser tab if they must.
This is how Zoom went from an unknown company to the signature product of 2020, and did so on a market ruled by giants like Microsoft or Google. Zoom is greeting its users with a red carpet rather than a drawbridge.