Helping people arrive on time – The Zoom Calendar sidebar

The Zoom calendar sidebar is the most successful feature I’ve seen released at Zoom. It not only brought users to the Zoom platform, but no one can’t live without it now.
— Youjin Jang, Lead Product Designer at Zoom

Background

In 2021, most enterprise users scheduled and joined meetings through Google Calendar or Outlook. This created friction: constant app-switching, confusion, and wasted time. People with back-to-back meetings had to leave Zoom entirely to join their next call.

Zoom had a Meetings tab, but it was barely used. A full calendar integration was months away (read Redesigning time at Zoom – Zoom Calendar), and user frustration was growing. We needed an MVP to keep users inside Zoom.

How might we ship a lightweight solution to smooth the join flow and keep enterprise users inside Zoom?

The Opportunity

If we could reduce friction in the Join meeting flow, we could:

• Keep users inside Zoom instead of external apps
• Improve the back-to-back meeting experience
• Build stronger retention habits through muscle memory

My Approach

I designed and prototyped a lightweight calendar sidebar, centered on a reusable meeting card. Through fast iteration and close collaboration with cross-functional teams, we refined the experience to be simple, stable, and delightful—ready for MVP release.

Final design

The MVP shipped as a calendar sidebar that listed today’s meetings, auto-scrolled to the current or next one, and surfaced a clear Join button. Live avatars and subtle highlights supported awareness without distraction.

What appeared simple was the result of dozens of iterations and close collaboration with engineering to ensure the component performed reliably under real-world meeting loads. The meeting card scaled beyond the sidebar, becoming a core building block reused across Zoom products.

Impact

• Immediate adoption: Users loved the sidebar from internal launch, and usage became sticky.
• Reduced friction: One-click joining made back-to-back meetings smooth.
• Retention boost: Strong muscle memory kept users inside the Zoom ecosystem.
• Public launch: Rolled out in Spring 2022, the sidebar remains a core retention driver for the Zoom client.

My Role

As Product Designer, I owned the MVP concept, prototype, and design specs through to release. I partnered with engineering and cross-functional design teams to test, refine, and ship the feature on an accelerated timeline, ensuring both short-term impact and long-term reusability.

• Framework design, Prototyping, User testing
• 2022
• New York, NY