#2 Whereby – In the name of simplicity
The Zoom alternative you probably haven't heard of
About the identity
Whereby, previously named appear.in, is a simple video conferencing tool focusing on collaboration, launched in 2013.Whenever I host a remote video call, I can already predict what would be the response of my invitee: “What's that tool we’re using?" That’s because I use Whereby as my default video conferencing tool. And to be honest, it’s nice, my ego likes to be niched.
I first encountered Whereby in 2020 right when the pandemic hit, as I was working with a small startup that explored the video space.
We tried and looked at many different products to better understand the surface. While tons of apps like Macro, mmhmm, and Around have started to emerge, Whereby was the one that really got my attention. Something in the way it looked and worked just resonated with me. To my surprise, it wasn’t new to the game at all as it was founded years before under the name appear.in back in 2013.
Unfortunately, this romance didn’t last long as my professional endeavors went sideways shortly after my part in that project ended. And so the days of Zoom and Google Meet have lasted for the next couple of years.
Last year when I got back to the indie world, I once again had the privilege to rethink the way I work and the tools I use. Actually, other than painful taxes, not much has changed in my workflow. But when I started to meet people again over video calls, I decided to ditch Zoom and Google Meet in favor of Whereby. And this time it stuck.
Why meetings aren’t novel
As an early 2000s kid, it was Skype that introduced me to the experience of calls over the internet. At first, calls were just audio. Having a dial-up internet without a webcam was hard enough to get video work.
During those formative years of internet communication, we used to hang out on Skype calls, and later on Ventrilo servers. These days filled times like long summer breaks and made us feel connected, even though some of us lived in the same neighborhood. I vividly remember ourselves saying that without it, we couldn’t stay in touch in the summertime. This sound will remain dear to my heart:
In the years later, those early experiences dissolved into young, fond memories.
The remote culture was yet to find its true meaning. I walked to school and rode the bus to work.
Through my adolescence time, it became less cool to play online games all night, and those times of online gatherings were replaced by late-night bench meetings at nearby parks.
Rewinding back to 2020, it seemed like remote work would last forever, so the concept of video calls over the internet must be reinvented.
It felt like the beginning of a new era.
Many folks jumped on the train and tried hard to reinvent the meeting wheel. From creating participant avatars to virtual office spaces and tools for increasing productivity during meetings. It seemed like ideas flourished.
However, it often felt that some of those attempts were forced to work.1
Sure, you can blame the world environment that gradually shifts to where it was before the pandemic for such “failures”, but I think that's only one small reason why this wave of startups has faded.
Maybe it’s because meetings were already one of the most hated activities in work culture, maybe many have been eaten by Zoom, or maybe it’s just the nature of hypes.
But I claim that all of these attempts were doomed to fail in the first place because the meeting experience, by its very nature, lacks novelty.
As Anthony Hobday writes about how he thinks about novelty:
Novelty distracts and is dangerous
If something is new it might distract us from fundamental issues with the thing. It is common for people to focus on something new even if it is worse. For the same reason that novelty is a useful tool, it can also be abused.
The fundamental issues of video calls have been ignored, perhaps deliberately, but as we’ve come to realize, people just don’t care about meetings as much as some wished.
It appears that what people really want is just a simple way to have a meeting.
From a personal standpoint I noticed that when I meet people over a video call, I mostly care about 1) showing up on time, 2) making it less time-consuming 3) avoiding wasting time dealing with technical issues.
I see these issues on the meta side of the spectrum. It’s up to me to remember to join a meeting and keep it on time. While there’s room for meeting assistants2 that might help me achieve such goals, it’s limited in my opinion.
They say startup work is never done, but to a large extent Whereby have accomplished many things to be proud of. Yes, meetings are boring by definition, and maybe there’s not much we can do about it. So, how might the meeting concept be improved instead of being forced to change?
That's exactly what I think Whereby has nailed. It just built something that works. A simple product that allows people to hop on a remote call effortlessly. That’s it. Nothing fancy.
But it really does feel like the time to get hyped about video chat apps is over. Sure, Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams are all very good at what they do. It’s great that things like custom backgrounds and emoji reactions are commonplace no matter which app you use. But when I hop on a video call, I’m still largely just staring at boxes of people, and the apps have mostly become utilities that I’m just not that excited to use.
– Jay Peters, The video call revolution is dead
Examining the Whereby experience in more detail unfolds more bits on how design can be reflected not only by an interface:
There’s no desktop client to download or install
Signing up isn’t required in order to join a call
Calls are very stable and run smooth
Just click the meeting link, type in a display name, and viola, you’re in.
Similar to Apple FaceTime, there’s a sense of as little interface as possible. As Dieter Rams once said:
"Good design is as little design as possible"
A common belief in product development strategy is that you rather be extremely good at one thing before expanding your offering. It reminds me of a comparison some people tend to make between the old dumbphone to the modern smartphone.
When the feature phone first came to the world, it was designed to primarily do one thing and that was obviously to enable people to make phone calls while they were away from home. With the advancement of time and technology, new features and functions were added to its vast capabilities.
Then we got the iPhone. And then you know the rest.
But even with all these fancy apps, the dumbphone is considered to this day, as being a better device to make a phone call in terms of quality and reception.
Better Call Quality: Since phones used to be mainly used for ... well, placing calls, it only makes sense that engineers would focus on this feature first and build the rest of the phone around it. This is not the case for smartphones, and many of today's most popular models rank surprisingly low on tests of call quality. Today's basic phones, on the other hand, are often mistaken for landline calls because of their crisp sound and appropriate volume.
– Noah Driver, 7 Reasons You Should Switch to a Dumb Phone
In that sense, Whereby feels like the dumb meeting tool. Whereby built its entire product around the only thing that matters – the communication itself. It’s not trying to be an omni app, whereas Google Meet and Zoom have become bloated by trying to provide extra functionality for supposed engagement.
Like phone calls, what’s important is that you can see clearly, hear loudly, and interact with your participants without interruptions. Once Whereby got the basic experience right, it could then grow its product offering and expand it to include more tools alongside a total rebranding3.
Built for the modern era
In the tech kingdom
Zoom and Google Meet are a kind of jack-of-all-trades products, and communicating through them feels generic or “boring”.
There’s no difference between these products and Whereby. In all of them, you’re staring at rectangles on your screen, sometimes waiting for your turn to make your voice heard.
So if meetings live in the sphere of boredom as discussed, how they might become more exciting?
If the act of talking, be it audio, voice, or both is the first layer, then the second one is the set of tools that complement the overall meeting experience.
I’m thinking about how I used to engage with social apps, especially when I was younger.
I spent countless hours chatting with friends over ICQ as a teenager. Yet for large parts of those times, we were just playing games that lived inside the platform, like Slide a Lama or Rock Paper Scissors.
On Facebook, we used to play Zynga poker and Farmville long before sharing posts or photo albums was a real thing.
On MSN Messenger, it was Minesweeper Flags.
All of these apps were relatively simple at that time and using them wasn’t a challenging task. These experiences remind me a lot of the way Whereby is designed and how it feels to use it.
The first communication layer is simple. You don’t have many places to get lost in. Nothing that’s overcomplicated.
Then it offers a set of out-of-the-box tools that harmonize the entire experience.
ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Facebook were all consumer apps, heavily focused on entertainment and connecting friends, thus they all integrated mostly games to enhance your time.
On the contrary, Whereby is an app for professionals, so it only makes sense that it would be focused on tools that connect people and teams around work interests. Therefore, most of their built-in tools and integrations revolve around the idea of making collaboration easier.
This also brings up the question of what types and modes of engagement the product optimizes for.
It feels that Zoom/Google Meet (the former especially) prioritizes effusive, demonstrative feedback with all the reactions and filters. They may be more suited to a larger corporate environment that has certain expectations of and constructs about productivity. Whereas to me it feels that Whereby, again especially through its interface, encourages deep, focused collaborative thinking. Even reactions are condensed away in the "chat" button.4
The amount of available integrations on Whereby doesn’t come near to what the Zoom app marketplace offers or to the funky features of Around. Yet it hand-picked the ones that are really important for teams to get their work done.
How many times have you screen-shared a Miro or Trello board with a peer?
Can you count how many times you’ve heard something like “Can you let me share my screen?” Do you remember where to do that all the time?
These are some of the hassles Whereby tackles.
Enabling participants to share Miro and Trello boards (among other tools) directly into the meeting interface makes collaboration seamless and easy. No need to share a screen, pick a tab or window, and navigate to your board.
Screen sharing doesn’t require playing with permissions granting back and forth and even parallel, multiple screen sharing is available for the benevolent.
You can set a customized room link, for example, whereby.com/itay so no PMI or serial-style string might get in your way.
These issues might seem minor to outsiders, but people who spend a large part of their time on video calls may find them a lot more bothersome. And these solutions, designed in a thoughtful interface are a great recipe for a great experience.
Outside the kingdom
The lockdown days have introduced and popularized the concept of remote meetings not only inside the borders of the tech industry.
Therapists, doctor clinics, meetups, and even academic institutions have gone online.
The draw of Whereby is in how lightweight it is. And it feels its use case. Although it’s similar to other video conferencing tools for meetings in a professional context, it has a fast-casual and friendly atmosphere just by the way it's designed.
On top of that, Whereby Embedded, the second half of the platform enables hosts to grab a meeting room and embed it inside an external website. That way, customers of customers can experience the product without even being aware of it.
In addition, its HIPAA5 compliance serves as a great alternative for healthcare companies that need a high level of security.
The startup’s secret weapon is enterprise integrations. If you had a video meeting with a UK GP over video in the last year it was probably over Whereby’s video (indeed, mine was!). The reason is because Whereby won a contract with AccuRx, one of their biggest API customers and UK’s NHS uses AccuRx software (within which Whereby provides the video API as part of AccuRx’s platform).
- Mike Butcher, TechCrunch
Video calls require us to be very active. You need to make sure to have the latest client update, install it, then find the right meeting link, and so on.
When the host takes full govern of the meeting, the participant becomes more passive, perhaps relaxed. From an experience that might end up cumbersome, it turns into a more expected activity. It’s a gap Whereby fills, enabling more types of customers to enjoy its platform.
A short appendix on the dark side of simplicity
As part of my research for this post, I turned to Reddit to find the Whereby official subreddit or some related interesting discussions. However, search results have shown things I didn’t expect to find.
It appears that some communities use Whereby for watching sexual content. A further innocent search led me to this article, which discusses the phenomena of online predators exploiting the Whereby platform for sexual abuse.
After further investigation, we found that online predators could exploit known functions in the Whereby platform to watch and record children without their active or informed consent.
Online predators target children’s webcams, study finds
26.9.23 — An update regarding the above citation
I want to stress that the quote was solely used to highlight that dangerous individuals are using Whereby for vicious purposes. It’s not intended to validate nor support the proposed technical claim.
On this note, this is an extensive comment I received from Whereby CEO, Andy Tyra:
Whereby takes the privacy and safety of its users very seriously. We're continuously investing in our technology to keep pace with the evolving information security landscape, and the capabilities of browsers and our other dependencies, and we also maintain partnerships with law enforcement to detect and mitigate harmful abuse patterns. That said, as Itay has eloquently written in his piece, we acknowledge that the simplicity and ease of use of our product means it can be used for nefarious purposes that violate our terms of service and, in rare cases, laws in various jurisdictions. Doing everything we can to ensure Whereby is a safe environment for its users, while also ensuring our technology respects their privacy, remains paramount for the entire Whereby team.
However, it's important to correct the misinformation about Whereby that has been published recently in several US media outlets: Whereby's platform does not allow any actor access to a user's camera without that user first giving explicit permission to do so via an explicit prompt by their browser. Further, despite the claims made in the article, no APIs are available at all in our Whereby Meetings product for enabling or disabling a user's camera. Both of these claims are simply false.
I’m not here to call out Whereby as a company or anything like this. In fact, any popular product or service gets abused this way or another. In the same space, Zoom also had to face similar situations when suddenly its usage massively grew.
You can never know if the product you build will make it. Moreover, you can’t exactly predict what niche or audience will adopt it in reality. You try to be novel in the way you build, tirelessly think about how to solve customers’ real-life problems, and then with a click of a button, you can be at the stake.
The reasons that attracted its presumable target audience and worked so well for them, were also why the Whereby product winked at less novel purposes. Much like in the Zoomboombing phenomenon:
It was simple to organize a virtual meeting or join one, but that was a weapon for trolls. Just as you could join your school district’s Zoom meeting with one click, so could anyone else who saw the meeting link on Twitter and wanted to disrupt it.
– Shira Ovide, Remember Zoom-bombing? This is how Zoom tamed meeting intrusions.
Technology companies obsess over removing “friction,” or barriers to using their product. Buying $1,000 patio furniture with one click on Amazon is no friction. Having to hunt in your email for the password to a Zoom knitting group is friction. – Shira Ovide, Remember Zoom-bombing? This is how Zoom tamed meeting intrusions.
In Whereby case I think not only their actual product is being exploited, but also their philosophy. On one hand, it had meticulously built a simple product aimed to help people facilitate work-related meetings, but on the other hand, it turned against it.
Thanks Leslie Liu, for reading drafts and contributing to this post.That was identity #2 of Product Identity, a publication that explores the design of noteworthy products. Thanks for reading.
– Itay
* I’m not affiliated with the company of Whereby in any way. The above post reflects my personal perspective and thoughts.
I do think there were products that saw some success in innovating the video space for short periods of time. However, I think it’s hard to sustain such businesses in the long run.
How can I not include a Brand New link when it’s available? https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_and_identity_for_whereby_by_heydays.php
Thanks Leslie for the great articulation.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.
https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/hipaa.html
I tried it years ago and it is super fluid. Thanks for the reminder! I will give it another try!
Another great alternative is here.fm that really empowers their users creative side.
https://here.fm/