Last week, I ran a live training on file upload UX.

Every day leading up to the event, I was stressed, constantly thinking:

“Shall I just purchase one month of Zoom?”

Let me explain:

I use Circle to run my courses and it comes with something called Live Rooms.

It’s like Zoom. But Live Rooms is better than Zoom because:

• it’s quicker and easier to set up for me
• it comes with my Circle subscription for free
• it automatically posts the recording afterward the call
• it has better UX for my students - easier interface, nothing separate to download

But Live Rooms has a limit of 30 attendees, including me as the host.

That leaves 29 spots for my students.

The problem is that I have hundreds of Form Design Mastery students.

So every day I stressed out trying to decide between two options:

Option #1: I choose Live Rooms and more than 29 students try to attend

In this case, the following happens:

• I start the call
• I say hello
• I start sharing file upload design patterns

We’re all having a great time.

But then I get multiple notifications:

“Help! I can’t access the event!”

I think “It’s too late, they’ll have to miss out, they can watch the recording later.”

But deep down I know that it’s not the same as attending live - being able to interact and ask questions.

So I tell the students on the call what’s happened, and that I’ll set up a Zoom call and share the link in a few minutes.

I leave the call, buy Zoom, set up a link, send it to everyone, and hope people haven’t lost interest.

Stress.

Best case scenario: the training has been delayed and I’ve wasted people’s time.

The other option is:

Option #2: I choose Zoom and fewer than 29 students turn up

This means I unnecessarily pay for a tool with worse UX for everyone.

Rubbish.

But it’s much better than Option 1. Which is why I’ve chosen this option in the past.

This time, however, I took a risk and used Live Rooms.

Why I took the risk of using Live Rooms

I checked the attendance rate from the last two Form Design Mastery live calls:

• Call #1: 37 students RSVP’d, 19 turned up.
• Call #2: 13 students RSVP’d, 6 turned up.

That’s approximately a 50% attendance rate.

So I’d need 60 people to RSVP before Live Rooms became a problem.

On the morning of the event, 22 people had RSVP’d.

During the day, one more person RSVP’d for a total of 23.

And like the previous data predicted, 12 ended up attending.

So it all worked out.

Even though Circle’s Live Rooms UX is brilliant, the 30-person limit is enough to ruin the entire feature.

And it’s simple to solve - either:

1. Increase the limit to 100, like Zoom does
2. Charge a small fee for going over the limit, instead of a hard cap
3. Reduce the cost of Circle by £10 per month and let users buy Zoom when they need it

In short:

Good UX is holistic.

Sometimes that means fixing something entirely outside the interface — like Circle’s attendee limit.

But most of the time, it just means looking past visual design to everything that shapes it.

For example, in my file upload UX training, I covered:

1. How to design the journey between devices for users who start on desktop but want to upload a photo on mobile
2. How to design a real-time, drag-and-drop multi-file upload that works with keyboard and screen readers
3. How to handle virus checking and the impact that has on what users see on screen while that’s happening

And so much more.

If you’re interested in learning about file upload UX, the recording has been automatically posted to the event (thanks Circle), and it’s available to everyone who signs up for Form Design Mastery:

​https://formdesignmastery.com​

Cheers,
Adam