Authors:
Jessica Snead, Susan Brosnan, Daniel Goins, Patricia Hogan
Abstract:
In the age of COVID-19, everyone is participating in more web conference meetings. Sometimes when you are presenting you want more feedback from the audience. This idea is to allow web conference participants to use emoticons/icons/buttons to provide feedback to the presenter in a non-intrusive way.
Background:
Many people must attend a lot more web conferences now that remote working is more prevalent. This idea is about ways to improve the web conference experience. In a face-to-face meeting the presenter and participants can gage the mood of the room. The presenter can see expressions or body language. In a large web conference with many participants, and the participant's video is disabled, there is no visual feedback to the presenter on how the meeting is going. Existing solutions are:
- to enable video, but it is hard to watch lots of small video screens of each person when there are many participants, especially if you are the presenter and are concentrating on sharing your screen
- for people to speak up to say they cannot hear the presenter, or the presenter is breaking up, or they cannot see the shared screen, or the font on the shared is too small, or they have a question. But sometimes in big meetings the participants have been muted by an operator/moderator so they cannot speak up. Other times, people are too shy to break into the presenter’s flow, either because they are shy or intimidated or it is bad manners in their culture, or they are struggling with a non-primary language.
- many web conferences have ways that the participants can click on a button to raise their hand to ask a question, or they can type in a group chat, that they have a question, but often the presenter does not see these things and it is left to a moderator to tell the presenter there are questions or issues, but for smaller calls there is no moderator.
- some web conferences let the participants take part in a web survey, but this usually has fixed questions for the participant to vote for and is only opened at specific times during the meeting.
Description:
Our idea is like the idea where the participant clicks on the button to raise their hand to ask a question, but we take the idea much further.
We have more buttons/icons/emoticons that the participant could click on, the participant can decide who they want to send the emoticon to, another participant, the presenter or to everyone. The participant can decide if they want to send anonymously or if they want to be identified. If they are sending to the presenter/entire group, the emoticon might show up on the screen the presenter is sharing, so the presenter can see there is feedback.
Our ideas for emoticon feedback include the following, but the list could be extended depending on the appropriateness for the type of meeting.
- Hand by ear to say speak up or cannot hear you,
- Finger over mouth to say be quiet (mute your microphone/shush/shhhhh!), silence your dog, stop interrupting, (more likely to be sent to another participant)
- Thumbs up, we understand or like it.
- Thumbs down, we don’t like it.
- Puzzled face or Question Mark for don’t understand
- Fast forward button, time to move on
- Magnifying glass for make the presentation bigger,
- Hand over eyes to say hide something on your screen (don’t want to see presenter's confidential teams chat or email) or turn-off your video
- Back button or some other button to ask the presenter to repeat something (not sure about this)
- Picture of a Drill to say you want to drill into more detail
- Some kind of “I have stepped away” icon,
- Pause button for those times when this is a multi-hour meeting and listeners need a bio or food break or mental break, or the meeting is getting heated and a break would let the angry participants cool off, if we get enough pause icons, we prompt the presenter or moderator to call a break.
This is not an exhaustive list of the emoticons you could send. You could have custom sets of emoticons for different cultures or company branded, or Star Wars or Dilbert themed… Perhaps there would be an opportunity to charge for themed emoticons.
When a participant hits a button, they could decide if they want just the presenter to see the button, or just one person (telling someone to mute themselves) or for the whole group to see the button. They could decide if they want to be identified as the button sender or be anonymous. If you want to be identified with the button, the button might show up on your picture or participant initials bubble. Perhaps if you were posting so the whole group could see that you want to move on, you would be anonymous, and others could hit their buttons to show if they want to move on too…
The presenter would see a lot of move-on buttons and know it is time for them to move on, or presenter would see lots of we cannot hear you buttons and know they have to fix their audio. Alternatively, the web conference software could sum the move-on/cannot hear you buttons and if they hit a threshold, the web conference software could flash the sign on the presenter’s screen. Most people, when they are presenting, cannot read the comments in the chat without losing their train of thought, but having the conference software flash you a message that people are ready to move on would be useful.
To turn off an emoticon
- a Participant can click button again to unset it,
- or for somethings, if presenter goes to next chart in presentation there could be a setting to reset all the buttons…
- buttons could time out,
- presenter could have button to clear all the buttons…
Related Prior Art:
Our idea is very similar to Mikogo. Our idea has added value because it can aggrege the responses to “feel the room”. The Mikogo idea has emojis but looks like the presenter has to view them one at a time by participant. Also, in Mikogo there does not seem to be a way to send anonymous feedback.
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/
Big Blue Button has Emojis too. It is not clear if Big Blue Button emojis are just for putting in a chat, or if the presenter could see how the audience are feeling. Big Blue Button did not have the idea of posting an anonymous emoji.
The unique part of our idea is being able to post emoticons anonymously but where the presenter or everyone can see them, so others can also post anonymously in such a way the presenter gets feedback without any of the participants feeling they are being rude or too pushy. The main two pieces that are different in our idea are:
- aggregating the responses, perhaps even having a threshold set before it tells the presenter that people are expressing that emoticon (like bored, move on, etc.).
Most people when they are presenting, can't read the comments coming in without losing their train of thought, so that would be a nice feature.
- the anonymous feedback, which might make people more likely to share something like "move on" without feeling like you are insulting the presenter.
TGCS Reference 2008
