UX

When it comes to business meetings, the next best thing about being there is the money you save by not having to go there in the first place.  That, of course, doesn’t pass for rocket science these days, and that’s why there’s a plethora of online meeting solutions available to the world-wary business traveler.  All of them do basically the same thing, which is, in a nutshell, real-time sharing, whether it be voice, video, presentation, files, or what-have-you.  So it’s hard for an online meeting company to stand out from the crowd on functionality alone.  Usability is what separates the leaders from the rest of the pack.

And when it comes to online meeting usability, Dimdim leads the pack.  Everything about Dimdim screams user friendly, from the sign up process, to the fact that you don’t need to download anything at all, to the interface itself.  Especially the interface.  Everything a meeting participant needs is laid out neatly in the browser window; everything a meeting participant could want to do is, at most, two clicks away.  Collaborative editing on a whiteboard or a presentation is intuitive; the editing tools themselves are front-and-center in the bottom right corner of the screen and are completely unobtrusive.

Where Dimdim’s usability really excels, however, is in its sharing capabilities.  Gone are the byzantine, multi-click, cross-your-fingers-and-pray-to-God control sharing “features” of other web-based meeting products, including very expensive ones.  With Dimdim, with a single click, a meeting presenter can lead a group of meeting participants in a “co-browsing” session.  With a single click, a meeting participant can share with the group his or her entire computer screen.  With a simple menu fly-out, the meeting presenter can make another meeting participant the presenter, give the person the microphone, give them the camera, initiate a private chat session, or dismiss the person from the meeting altogether.

All of this one-click functionality is available to meeting participants in a clean, crisp, inviting space that’s—surprisingly—dominated by white space.  It’s as if Dimdim’s information architects and visual designers found a way to stuff a Maersk-line shipping crate of functionality into a shoebox, then made the shoebox disappear entirely, because even that was too cluttered.  The browser space is truly a masterpiece of user-centered design.

Yes, Dimdim is that good.  Now, how much would you pay for such a great product?

Put down the company credit card, because Dimdim is free.  And open source.

Make a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.  Thanks to its incredible user-centered design, Dimdim has poised itself among the top of the web meeting heap.  The others are now playing catch-up.

By Robert Pothier