Requirements and Recommendations for an Enhanced Meeting Viewing Experience Sasa Junuzovic Computer Science Department University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC sasa@cs.unc.edu Rajesh Hegde, Zhengyou Zhang, Phil A. Chou, Zicheng Liu and Cha Zhang Microsoft Research Redmond, WA {rajeshh,zhang,pachou,zliu,chazhang}@microsoft.com ABSTRACT We have found that viewing recorded meetings using traditional meeting viewers whose interfaces consist of an automatic speaker and a fixed context view does not provide sufficient information and control to the users. In particular, a survey of users who watch meeting recordings on a regular basis revealed that it is also useful to provide (1) speaker-related information, including who the speaker is talking to, looking at, and being interrupted by, and (2) more control of the interface, including changing the relative sizes of the speaker and context views and navigating within the context view. We present a 3D interface prototype designed specifically to meet these requirements when viewing recorded meetings. We describe in detail the results of a user study comparing the effectiveness of the new and traditional style interfaces with respect to these requirements. Based on this study, we present a set of guidelines for future interfaces. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4.3 [Communication Applications]: Computer conferencing, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing. H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Video; Audio input/output; H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Interaction styles; User-centered design. General Terms Design, Human Factors, Experimentation. Keywords Remote Meeting Viewer, Requirements, Recommendations. 1. INTRODUCTION Meetings are an integral part of workplace dynamics. However, due to travel, time, or other constraints, attending a meeting in person may not be practical for some invitees. As a result, a number of commercial systems, such as Microsoft’s LiveMeeting and Cisco’s WebEx, and research systems [1][2][3] have been developed for remote meeting attendance or offline viewing of recorded meetings. In either case, one of the main goals of these systems is capturing the relevant aspects of the meeting, without which people may not actually view the meeting. Capturing the relevant aspects is more important for offline meeting viewing, which is the case we focus on, than for remotely attending a meeting. The reason is that during an ongoing meeting, remote attendees can interrupt the conversation to ask for clarifications, which is not possible in the case of a person watching a recorded meeting. The aspects of a meeting that are important are meeting- dependent. In general, meetings can be roughly classified into two types. In one type of meeting, there are a large number of attendees, but only a few of them are active. An example of such a meeting is a lecture in which there is one lecturer and a large audience. In the other type of meeting, there are a small number of attendees, but the majority of them are active. Examples of such meetings are brainstorming sessions, team weekly status meetings, and new hire discussions. We focus on viewing recordings of the second, more interactive type of meeting. A key aspect of interactive meetings is the current speaker, who is, by definition, changing frequently. Thus, traditional meeting viewing interfaces for such meetings have an automatic speaker view, which always shows the current speaker. Previous work [3] has also identified that the speaker view should be coupled with a fixed context view, which shows an overview of all of the attendees. The overview may show a small thumbnail-size video of each attendee or a panoramic view of the meeting room that captures all of the attendees. Our research indicates that for viewing recorded meetings, the combination of an automatic speaker and fixed context views does not provide sufficient information. For example, we found that users desire speaker-related information such as who the speaker is talking to, looking at, and being interrupted by. We also found that they desire control of the context views. For instance, a user may want to focus on a non-speaking attendee in the context view. In this paper, we present a 3D interface prototype designed specifically to meet these requirements. A twenty participant user study revealed that the viewing experience is better with the 3D prototype than with the traditional interface. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We first motivate the need for each additional kind of information and control in the interface. Following this, we describe the 3D interface prototype. We then present in detail the results of a study comparing the 3D interface to a typical existing system. From the results, we extract several new guidelines for future meeting viewing systems. Finally, we end with related work, brief conclusions, and directions for future work. 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS The requirements of a meeting viewing system are a function of the type of meeting. As mentioned above, we focus on the type of meeting in which there is a small number of attendees (fewer than Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MM’08, October 26–31, 2008, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 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