In today’s work and life, the use of video meeting systems is ubiquitous. As usage continues to rise, the negative effects of video meeting systems on users have become apparent. Consequently, scholars and public media have called for a better comprehension of the impact of video meeting systems on users with respect to psychological user states and ensuing outcomes. However, a synopsis of existing empirically grounded knowledge in this field is non-existent. To fill this gap, we review existing literature with a focus on psychological user states from a cognitive and affective perspective as well as downstream outcomes. Specifically, we review and conceptualize findings from 78 quantitative studies and describe the results in a morphological box. We identified a focus on examining the overall systems’ impact on the user states of attention, awareness, and negative emotions. Moreover, there has been a rise in literature examining recently developed features that concentrate on supporting attention and emotion understanding. Besides, video meeting systems have been predominantly explored in the context of generic conversations in work settings. By providing future research directions, this overview offers scholars the potential to design their studies more effectively and informs designers to facilitate system improvements based on empirical findings.

Video meeting systems offer great potential for work and life, but they can also have negative effects. One reason is the presence of technical stimuli that do not exist in the physical world. A prominent example is the self-view feature, a mirrored image of oneself shown during the video meeting. The self-view feature comes with a trade-off between the advantage of enhancing control and the disadvantage of increasing cognitive load of its users. So far, research is scarce when it comes to understanding this ambivalent nature and studies mostly relied on self-reported data without considering the actual interaction with the self-view. To address this gap, we conducted an experimental study with 57 participants and two design variants (with/without self-view), analyzed user perceptions through surveys and interviews, and explored gaze patterns using eye-tracking technology. Results reveal varying perceptions of cognitive load and control among self-view users and between the design variants, highlighting its ambivalent nature. We see differences in how participants interact with the self-view. In a cluster analysis, we identify three user groups (Benefiting Users, Cognitively Challenged Users, Control Losing Users). These groups also show differences in visual behavior, especially median fixation duration, and user characteristics. Based on our findings, we outline design recommendations for more flexible and intelligent design solutions by considering user groups and their individual differences.

Crowd feedback overcomes scalability issues of feedback collection on interactive website designs. However, collecting feedback on crowdsourcing platforms decouples the feedback provider from the context of use. This creates more effort for crowdworkers to immerse into such context in crowdsourcing tasks. In this paper, we present CrowdSurfer, a browser extension that seamlessly integrates design feedback collection in crowdworkers’ everyday internet surfing. This enables the scalable collection of in situ feedback and, in parallel, allows crowdworkers to flexibly integrate their work into their daily activities. In a field study, we compare the CrowdSurfer against traditional feedback collection. Our qualitative and quantitative results reveal that, while in situ feedback with the CrowdSurfer is not necessarily better, crowdworkers appreciate the effortless, enjoyable, and innovative method to conduct feedback tasks. We contribute with our findings on in situ feedback collection and provide recommendations for the integration of crowdworking tasks in everyday internet surfing.

Leveraging crowdsourcing in software development has received growing attention in research and practice. Crowd feedback offers a scalable and flexible way to evaluate software design solutions and the potential of crowd-feedback systems has been demonstrated in different contexts by existing research studies. However, previous research lacks a deep understanding of the effects of individual design features of crowd-feedback systems on feedback quality and quantity. Additionally, existing studies primarily focused on understanding the requirements of feedback requesters but have not fully explored the qualitative perspectives of crowd-based feedback providers. In this paper, we address these research gaps with two research studies. In study 1, we conducted a feature analysis (N=10) and concluded that from a user perspective, a crowd-feedback system should have five core features (scenario, speech-to-text, markers, categories, and star rating). In the second study, we analyzed the effects of the design features on crowdworkers' perceptions and feedback outcomes (N=210). We learned that offering feedback providers scenarios as the context of use is perceived as most important. Regarding the resulting feedback quality, we discovered that more features are not always better as overwhelming feedback providers might decrease feedback quality. Offering feedback providers categories as inspiration can increase the feedback quantity. With our work, we contribute to research on crowd-feedback systems by aligning crowdworker perspectives and feedback outcomes and thereby making the software evaluation not only more scalable but also more human-centered.

Video-meetings essentially determine remote work life. However, video-meetings experience challenges originating from human emotions. Therefore, emotional competence, the ability to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions, is of the highest relevance. With limited transfer capacity of emotional information and various communication challenges, developing emotional competence, however, is complex. To overcome this complexity, we present TeamSpiritous, an individual, retrospective emotional competence development system for video-meetings. TeamSpiritous allows to upload and analyze recorded video-meetings on emotional processes and provides support for individual development of emotional competence. We evaluated TeamSpiritous quantitatively and qualitatively in a six-week, longitudinal field study with 47 participants from China and Germany. Results of our study show that intra- and interpersonal emotional competence significantly increased over time for the whole sample. In particular, intrapersonal emotion regulation and interpersonal emotion perception and understanding improved. Since remote work video-meetings are often multicultural, we also investigated cultural differences and observed in our results that the effects of TeamSpiritous exist beyond cultural backgrounds (China, Germany). With our work, we contribute with the design of TeamSpiritous and understanding of its effects on emotional competence development.

Fueled by the pervasion of tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, the usage of text-based communication in distributed teams has grown massively in organizations. This brings distributed teams many advantages, however, a critical shortcoming in these setups is the decreased ability of perceiving, understanding and regulating emotions. This is problematic because better team members? abilities of emotion management positively impact team-level outcomes like team cohesion and team performance, while poor abilities diminish communication flow and well-being. Leveraging chatbot technology in distributed teams has been recognized as a promising approach to reintroduce and improve upon these abilities. In this article we present three chatbot designs for emotion management for distributed teams. In order to develop these designs, we conducted three participatory design workshops which resulted in 153 sketches. Subsequently, we evaluated the designs following an exploratory evaluation with 27 participants. Results show general stimulating effects on emotion awareness and communication efficiency. Further, they report emotion regulation and increased compromise facilitation through social and interactive design features, but also perceived threats like loss of control. With some design features adversely impacting emotion management, we highlight design implications and discuss chatbot design recommendations for enhancing emotion management in teams.