Jaeyoon Song
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Even though today’s videoconferencing systems are often very useful, these systems do not provide support for one of the most important aspects of in-person meetings: the ad hoc, private conversations that happen before, after, and during the breaks of scheduled events—the proverbial hallway conversations. Here we describe our design of a simple system, called Minglr, which supports this kind of interaction by facilitating the matching of conversational partners. We describe two studies of this system’s use at two virtual conferences with over 450 total participants. Our results provide evidence for the usefulness of this capability, showing that, for example, 81% of people who used the system successfully thought that future virtual conferences should include a tool with similar functionality. We expect similar functionality to be useful for many other business and social meetings, thus increasing the desirability of many kinds of remote work and socializing.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445776
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)