The pandemic brought a new way of working. Like many others, we had to quickly adapt and choose the right tools for remote collaboration. My company settled on Zoom for video calls. While adjusting to remote work and juggling multiple new tools was initially a challenge, we eventually found our rhythm. But over time, we also started noticing gaps in the tools we had so eagerly adopted.
One of those gaps became clear during meetings. There were often moments when I needed to jot something down quickly — an idea, a task, a follow-up. But doing that meant switching to another app, which broke the flow of the conversation. That's when I got the idea: what if Zoom had a built-in space for taking quick notes during a call?
Zooming Into the Details
Before Zoom introduced a wave of new features — Whiteboard, Timer, Music, and the AI Companion — the video call interface was much simpler and less cluttered. At that time, there was no built-in Notes feature. While a few third-party tools offered integrations for live transcription and note-taking, they weren't widely adopted by everyday Zoom users. My idea was to suggest a lightweight, native solution for quick note-taking — something simple and easy to integrate into the existing experience.
I placed the Notes icon on the far right of the Zoom interface — and that's where the concept started to take shape. Clicking the icon would open a side panel for quick note-taking. The idea was to let users type directly within the panel or pop it out into a resizable window, enabling a split-screen view alongside the video call.
Once the notes were written, users could choose to save them locally or upload them directly to a connected service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Evernote. This would make it easy to store and share meeting notes right after the call — without breaking the flow of the meeting itself. It was a simple feature, but even in that early form, it felt like just enough to solve the problem without adding extra complexity.
I was two years ahead of the curve.
I uploaded this project to Behance on February 1st, 2021, and Zoom officially announced their own Notes on August 30th, 2023.
While my concept wasn't packed with advanced features, I like to imagine that maybe — just maybe — one of the designers working on Zoom Notes came across my project and found a bit of inspiration. Jokes aside, I truly believe this was a highly requested feature, and I'm glad it eventually became part of the product. It's great to know that something like this is now helping so many users.
Here's a short video I prepared to showcase how the note-taking interactions were designed: