Are you sure? Some very basic mass meeting settings are spread across at least five or six menus and popups, all available once the meeting has already started. You can't set the "people can't unmute themselves by default" flag without muting everyone else in the meeting first, it seems.
Half or more of these options should go in a single "meeting configuration" screen in my opinion.
If you just start using the software, you'll have to go through every menu and click every button just to discover the ways people can disturb your meeting. This seems like a terrible user interface for any meeting that's either important or features more than a handful of people.
Calling the user an idiot does nothing to fix the problem. If this setting is buried under advanced settings, most users will never look for it. It sounds like the system could be more upfront about how these things are configured before launching the meeting. It would likely be helpful to remember settings from last session and warn the user if they are deviating from those settings. Perhaps they need to have a saved settings function where a user can save a batch of settings to be reused. I might also wonder how user accounts are setup, to make sure this organization is using this account only for official use, to help make it easier to keep track of these saved sessions.
I don't know about you, but I am an engineer. My job is to consider how the product can be improved, not say "it's fine" and blame the user.
If Zoom does not improve these things, they may lose customers to a competitor who does. Then the engineer that says "it's fine" will be out of a job.
There isn’t as much malice in my calling the user an idiot as it might seem. I was recalling a quote by Rick Cook, “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”
I don’t think that quote means that users are idiots for not being able to use your UX, nor do I think is it saying that you shouldn’t devote effort to making your UX clearer and easier to use. In my view, the message is that UX is a bit like an arms race, or a Red Queen race, or some other kind of race - that is, you should always be improving your UX, and simultaneously you’ll never have the perfect UX that everyone can use for everything they want to do without any confusion.
This affects how you react to an instance of confusion: it is not a signal that the UX in question necessarily needs to be changed, as it may be working well for every other user and a change will introduce more confusion. It IS a signal to investigate the UX in question and see if it can be improved, you shouldn’t discard the signal entirely. But that investigation might sometimes conclude the UX design is acceptable!
Phrases like “PEBCAK” and “a better idiot” are colorful and thus can appear dismissive and insulting without context, but they do have useful and charitable interpretations too.
(To your specific point, in the course of my dev work I have done some UX engineering, and “automatically persist settings from previous session” is actually a feature I have implemented, although iirc the motivation in our case was more about convenience. We found users ended up with more misconfigurations afterward - they would change the settings just fine for one-off unusual cases because they were actively thinking about the settings they needed. Afterwards they would go back to their usual case and NOT be thinking about settings, so they would get caught out, they would change just the one setting they got caught out by, get caught out again, and so on. Multiple misconfigured sessions after every unusual session was an immediate pain point after we made the change, and we ended up reverting it. Long-term, the solution we found the fewest issues with was having the administrator accounts set specific defaults for each user account and the users could choose to deviate from those settings each session. The administrators were generally in a position to weigh each user’s usual use-case along with the risk if that user was misconfigured. It provided most of the convenience we wanted, and it also gave companies the opportunity to develop policies around which settings to use. Even the colorful language has a role to play - I have had the exact thought process of “this user story doesn’t sound like a particularly impressive case of idiocy, so there probably is something wrong with our UX here” quite a few times. The unwillingness to label the user an idiot directly motivated improvements to UX in those cases.)
The fact that you had to share a third-party website walking people through the steps of configuring it means the UX is not fine.
Zoom is powerful but not easy to configure if you don't use it every day. I certainly had my problems too and I'm working in tech and not "bad with computers" usually.
User being too idiot to user the interface almost by definition means it's bad UX. If your userbase is not attentive/smart enough to use the interface, it's an interface problem, not a user problem.
It seems like the kind of defaults that should depend on the visibility of the meeting. Public -> No webcams and muted by default, normal -> webcams and mics.
