The first virtual queue for 10M+ remote workers
The team that said no to AI
In March 2020, COVID-19 forced the world into remote work overnight. Teams were asked to drop all existing goals to deliver “Rooms”, a video conferencing product that could compete with Zoom.
Video calls suddenly became our primary collaboration tool, but they lacked the nuanced social dynamics of in-person meetings.
Launched in 12 weeks that scale from 2 to 50+ participants during peak COVID demand
Cross-platform collaboration with 10+ designers and PMs across London, Seattle and San Fransisco
Designed + Built an unified experience that scales across Messenger and WorkChat, for WWW, iOS and Android
“We don’t need AI to wave”
The initial brief focused on using AI to detect hand gesture to raise or lower hand in a video call. However, we challenged this assumption early in the process. Training the AI model with high level of accuracy under tight timeline was hard and costly, instead we reframed the challenge from a technological solution to an elegant design.
Problems and Opportunity
Rather than accepting the original scope, we decided to take a step back and learn more about the why. We conducted user research with 60min interviews, from knowledge workers of various company sizes, who actively organise and moderate meetings.
For workplace users
Customers were scrambling to find remote work solutions. Poor virtual meeting experiences were affecting team productivity during a critical transition to remote work.
The lack of social cues in VC problem exacerbated in larger group calls where natural flow of conversation is disruptive workers raised as a major challenge
Meeting chaos: Hard to stay engaged with frequent interruptions and talking over each other
Participation inequality: Quiet team members struggling to find opportunities to speak, “The loudest person takes all the air”
Cultural barriers: Reduced inclusivity, especially for introverted or non-native speakers
Inefficient facilitation as meeting organizers losing control of discussion flow
For Meta
The video conferencing landscape became intensely competitive as the COVID-19 pandemic drove massive demand for remote communication tools. Zoom emerged as the dominant video conferencing platform.
Beyond feature parity to Zoom, Meta needed a feature differentiator.
Not just a wave icon 👋 — The Virtual queue
Challenging the brief: No AI, but a scalable system design.
Despite the obvious choice of displaying a hand-raising icon in each person's video frame, I designed an independent queue system that also functioned as an in-call notification.
This solved critical usability problems:
Large group scalability: When you have many people in a call, participants might be out of the visible grid
Visual clarity: In crowded grid views with many participants, individual icons are hardly visible
Seamless transitions: One solution that works across 2-person to 50+ person calls, in both gallery and primary speaker view
Double down on Inclusivity: A queue to include waiting time for individual participants to encourage participations
I took the opportunity to create a unified solution across Messenger Rooms and WorkChat that could scale across Meta's entire collaboration ecosystem:
Platform Strategy
Unified Experience: Consistent patterns across consumer (Messenger) and enterprise (WorkChat) use cases
Technical Architecture: Solutions that worked within existing constraints, as the two products shared the same infrastructure
Future-Proofing: Designs that could evolve with platform changes (navigation updates, moderator rules)
Scalable Components: Patterns that could be adopted by other Meta collaboration products
55% usage for meeting over 6 participants
70%+ with over 8+ participants
Design further scaled other products such as VR meeting room in the following year
What Made This Successful
Strategic Problem Reframing: Challenged and successfully advocated against AI-first approach in favour of effective, elegant design solution.
Platform-First Thinking: Designing for multiple products from the start created efficiencies and broader impact
Inclusive-by-Design: Prioritising accessibility and cultural considerations from day one ensured broad adoption
Cross-team Coordination: Managed complex stakeholder alignment across 10+ designers with multiple product teams
Rapid Adaptation: Fast context-switching and ramping up to new design systems under tight deadlines while maintaining quality.