Greenlight usability issues for Big Blue Button first-time tryers
It started with something that went wrong in the administrative user experience, that then very negatively impacted the experience of someone trying for the first time.
In the initial room settings dialog that was part of creating the room in the frist place, i definitely checkmarked “Allow any user to start this meeting” and “All users join as moderators”. I’m not sure if there’s a UX bug and i missed the save button, or if there’s a software bug and these initial options get ignored. In any case, these desired settings were not applied and i had to go back to set them in room options again later:
Something that would be helpful in this case, and in any case— could we be allowed to make options the default account-wide? So every room by default has these options enabled?
Not being allowed to start the meeting resulted in a person newly trying BigBlueButton to get the “waiting for your meeting to start” message. This person is fairly tech savvy but confronted with this they tried to “Sign in” or “Sign up”, because those buttons are prominently at the top of the Greenlight instance despite being unusable by anyone we at Agaric invite to use our account. The “Sign up” button just takes people to the homepage with the error message “You do not have an invitation to join. Please contact your administrator to receive one.”
The person who joined a little later was in the BigBlueButton room fine, but unable to explain how to get out of the sign in dead end, we ended up back on Zoom.
Finally, another usability request: Can we have custom room paths that include the name of the room? Easy to tell which room a URL is for at a glance, and makes it easier for the right URL to come up in browser address bar suggestions based on web visit history.
Another request: If recording is not enabled (at the least), can the headline “Public Room Recordings” simply not be shown? When we’re trying to explain to people that BigBlueButton is a better privacy alternative to Zoom, that rather undermines the case, even if it says underneath “This room has no public recordings.”