A small plea to the people who build video calls

A colleague does the polite thing. They have a question, or a comment, or a small correction to something the presenter just said. Rather than interrupting, they click the little hand icon. A faint indicator appears in the participant list. The presenter, who is sharing a deck and looking at the slide, does not see it. Five minutes go by. The hand is still up. The moment has passed. Eventually someone in the chat types "Person X has had a hand up for a while" and we awkwardly rewind.

The fix is not subtle. When someone raises a hand during a call where another participant is presenting, that hand should appear somewhere obvious to the presenter. Not in the participant list which is buried under the screen-share UI. A small, clear notification that does not require the speaker to interrupt their flow to find it. A toast, a banner, a glowing edge of the screen-share window - the specific design is not the hard part. The hard part is having decided that the experience of a participant trying to politely contribute is worth optimising for.

Why I think it persists

The reason I suspect this has not been fixed across the major platforms is that the people who design these tools are usually the ones presenting, not the ones raising a hand. The presenter's pain is on the wrong side of the asymmetry. They get to power through the slide. The participant gets to feel ignored, decide it was not that important, and quietly stop contributing. Multiplied across millions of meetings, it is a small but consistent tax on the kinds of voices a team most needs to hear from.

I am not a UX designer. I do not know what the right notification looks like for a screen-share session in front of forty people versus a one-to-one. I trust the people who do this for a living to figure that out. I would just like them to figure it out. Almost every other affordance in modern call software has been polished obsessively over the last five years. This one has not, and it is the one that most directly affects whether quieter people get heard.

Yours, a customer who promises to keep raising the issue politely, with the hand icon, until someone notices.