Ineffective meetings are pervasive. Thinking ahead explicitly about meeting goals may improve effectiveness, but current collaboration platforms lack integrated support. We tested a lightweight goal-reflection intervention in a preregistered field experiment in a global technology company (361 employees, 7196 meetings). Over two weeks, workers in the treatment group completed brief pre-meeting surveys in their collaboration platform, nudging attention to goals for upcoming meetings. To measure impact, both treatment and control groups completed post-meeting surveys about meeting effectiveness. While the intervention impact on meeting effectiveness was not statistically significant, mixed‑methods findings revealed improvements in self‑reported awareness and behaviour across both groups, with post‑meeting surveys unintentionally functioning as an intervention. We highlight the promise of supporting goal reflection, while noting challenges of evaluating and supporting workplace reflection for meetings, including workflow and collaboration norms, and attitudes and behaviours around meeting preparation. We conclude with implications for designing technological support for meeting intentionality.

Peer Reviewed

Meetings often suffer from a lack of intentionality, such as unclear goals and straying off-topic. Identifying goals and maintaining their clarity throughout a meeting is challenging, as discussions and uncertainties evolve. Yet meeting technologies predominantly fail to support meeting intentionality. AI-assisted reflection is a promising approach. To explore this, we conducted a technology probe study with 15 knowledge workers, integrating their real meeting data into two AI-assisted reflection probes: a passive and active design. Participants identified goal clarification as a foundational aspect of reflection. Goal clarity enabled people to assess when their meetings were off-track and reprioritize accordingly. Passive AI intervention helped participants maintain focus through non-intrusive feedback, while active AI intervention, though effective at triggering immediate reflection and action, risked disrupting the conversation flow. We identify three key design dimensions for AI-assisted reflection systems, and provide insights into design trade-offs, emphasizing the need to adapt intervention intensity and timing, balance democratic input with efficiency, and offer user control to foster intentional, goal-oriented behavior during meetings and beyond.

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices.We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so.Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks.Quantitatively, when considering both task-and user-specific factors, a user's task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks.Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship.Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.

We conducted a within-subjects study to examine how realistic faces and cartoon faces on avatars affect communication, task satisfaction, sense of presence, and mood perception in mixed reality meetings. Over the course of two weeks, six groups of co-workers (14 people) held recurring meetings using Microsoft HoloLens2 devices, each person embodying a personal full-body avatar with either a realistic face or cartoon face. Half of the groups started with the realistic face avatar and switched to the cartoon face version halfway through (RC condition), and the other half with the cartoon-face avatar first (CR condition). Results showed that participants in the RC condition may have had higher expectations and more errors in perceiving their colleagues’ moods. Participants in the CR condition reported that the avatars’ appearance mattered less over time and experienced increased comfort and improved identification of their colleagues. Participants rated words, tone of voice, and movement as the most useful cues for perceiving colleagues’ moods, regardless of avatar rendering style. In the RC condition, participants rated gaze as more useful than facial expressions, while in the CR condition, both gaze and facial expressions were rated as the least useful. Results also suggested that participants had more errors when perceiving negative moods in their colleagues, with this trend appearing for most moods, but depending on conditions. Implications of these findings for mixed and virtual reality meetings are discussed. This work contributes to the field of remote collaboration by providing insights from longitudinal data on the impact of avatar appearance on various aspects of work meetings in virtual environments. • Realistic avatars may lead to higher expectations and errors in perceiving moods. • Cartoon avatars may increase the comfort and identification of colleagues over time. • For both avatars, words, voice, and movement were the most useful to perceive moods. • Avatar’s evaluation should be longitudinal as attitudes towards them change over time. • Avatar attitudes depend on context; evaluation should prioritise ecological validity. • Avatars’ identification, communication, and emotional trust may outweigh appearance.

Avatars are edging into mainstream videoconferencing, but evaluation of how avatar animation modalities contribute to work meeting outcomes has been limited. We report a within-group videoconferencing experiment in which 68 employees of a global technology company, in 16 groups, used the same stylized avatars in three modalities (static picture, audio-animation, and webcam-animation) to complete collaborative decision-making tasks. Quantitatively, for meeting outcomes, webcam-animated avatars improved meeting effectiveness over the picture modality and were also reported to be more comfortable and inclusive than both other modalities. In terms of avatar satisfaction, there was a similar preference for webcam animation as compared to both other modalities. Our qualitative analysis shows participants expressing a preference for the holistic motion of webcam animation, and that meaningful movement outweighs realism for meeting outcomes, as evidenced through a systematic overview of ten thematic factors. We discuss implications for research and commercial deployment and conclude that webcam-animated avatars are a plausible alternative to video in work meetings.

Effective meetings are effortful, but traditional videoconferencing systems offer little support for reducing this effort across the meeting lifecycle. Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to radically redefine meetings by augmenting intentional meeting behaviors. CoExplorer, our novel adaptive meeting prototype, preemptively generates likely phases that meetings would undergo, tools that allow capturing attendees’ thoughts before the meeting, and for each phase, window layouts, and appropriate applications and files. Using CoExplorer as a technology probe in a guided walkthrough, we studied its potential in a sample of participants from a global technology company. Our findings suggest that GenAI has the potential to help meetings stay on track and reduce workload, although concerns were raised about users’ agency, trust, and possible disruption to traditional meeting norms. We discuss these concerns and their design implications for the development of GenAI meeting technology.

Ineffective meetings due to unclear goals are major obstacles to productivity, yet support for intentionality is surprisingly scant in our meeting and allied workflow technologies. To design for intentionality, we need to understand workers’ attitudes and practices around goals. We interviewed 21 employees of a global technology company and identified contrasting mental models of meeting goals: meetings as a means to an end, and meetings as an end in themselves. We explore how these mental models impact how meeting goals arise, goal prioritization, obstacles to considering goals, and how lack of alignment around goals may create tension between organizers and attendees. We highlight the challenges in balancing preparation, constraining scope, and clear outcomes, with the need for intentional adaptability and discovery in meetings. Our findings have implications for designing systems which increase effectiveness in meetings by catalyzing intentionality and reducing tension in the organisation of meetings.

Generative AI (GenAI) systems offer unprecedented opportunities for transforming professional and personal work, yet present challenges around prompting, evaluating and relying on outputs, and optimizing workflows. We argue that metacognition—the psychological ability to monitor and control one’s thoughts and behavior—offers a valuable lens to understand and design for these usability challenges. Drawing on research in psychology and cognitive science, and recent GenAI user studies, we illustrate how GenAI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, requiring a high degree of metacognitive monitoring and control. We propose these demands could be addressed by integrating metacognitive support strategies into GenAI systems, and by designing GenAI systems to reduce their metacognitive demand by targeting explainability and customizability. Metacognition offers a coherent framework for understanding the usability challenges posed by GenAI, and provides novel research and design directions to advance human-AI interaction.

Hybrid meetings limit inclusion for remote participants. The Hybridge experimental system provides different interfaces for remote and room endpoints, focusing on improving inclusion via shared spatiality and remote agency. In-room participants see remotes on displays around a table, and remotes see video integrated into a digital twin. Remotes can choose where to appear and from where they view the room. We tested Hybridge in a within-subjects study of group survival tasks. An in-person condition was followed by a counterbalanced order of hybrid traditional videoconferencing ("Gallery") and Hybridge. We found that co-presence and agency differences between in-room and remotes were alleviated in Hybridge but remained in Gallery. Physical presence for remotes was higher in Hybridge than Gallery. Conversation flow was better in Hybridge than Gallery, but ease of awareness was not different. We argue that asymmetry should be embraced when designing hybrid meeting systems, with inclusivity achieved by tailoring features for the needs of different endpoints.

Via Research through Design (RtD), we explore the potential of headphones as a general-purpose input device for both foreground motion-gestures as well as background sensing of user activity. As a familiar wearable device, headphones offer a compelling site for head-situated interaction and sensing. Using emerging sensing modalities such as inertial motion, capacitive touch sensing, and depth cameras, our implemented prototypes explore sensing and interaction techniques that offer a range of compelling capabilities.

Mobile Robotic Telepresence (MRP) systems afford remote communication with an embodied physicality and autonomous mobility, which is thought to be useful for creating a sense of presence in hybrid activities. In this paper, drawing on phenomenology, we interviewed seven long term users of MRP to understand the lived experience of participating in hybrid spaces through a telepresence robot. The users' accounts show how the capabilities of the robot impact interactions, and how telepresence differs from in-person presence. Whilst not feeling as if they were really there, users felt present when they were being able to participate in local action and be treated as present. They also report standing out and being subject to behaviour amounting to 'othering'. We argue that these experiences point to a need for future work on telepresence to focus on giving remote users the means to exercise autonomy in ways that enable them to participate --- to be 'in on the action' --- rather than in ways that simply simulate being in-person.

With the shift to hybrid meetings in work spaces, there is an increasing need to create a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience where people meeting together in a room interact with those joining remotely. This paper describes a design exploration, implementation, and evaluation of Perspectives, a novel hybrid meeting system that aimed to create an inclusive and equitable space for hybrid meetings. Perspectives digitally composites everyone into a virtual room so that each person has a unique but spatially consistent viewpoint into the meeting. The user study compared Perspectives with three commercially available UX designs for hybrid meetings: Gallery, Together Mode, and Front Row. Results from this study revealed key benefits of Perspectives, including supporting natural interactions, creating a strong sense of co-presence, and reducing cognitive load. Results from the study also helped iterate on the design principles of Perspectives, which offer important insights on supporting hybrid meetings.

Mobile Robotic Telepresence (MRP) systems are remotely controlled, mobile videoconferencing devices that allow the remote user to move independently and have a physical presence in the environment. This paper presents a longitudinal study of MRP use in the home, where the first author used an MRP to connect with family, her partner, and friends over a six-month period. Taking an ethnomethodological approach, we present video recorded fragments to explore the phenomenon of ‘visiting’ where MRP users drop into the home for a period of time. We unpack the more ‘procedural’ elements—arriving and departing—alongside ways of ‘dwelling’ together during a visit, and the qualities of mobility, autonomous presence and spontaneity that emerge.

Casual conversation, where people engage in social talk or phatic communion (Coupland et al., 1992) (i.e., non-task oriented talk) is acknowledged as important in facilitating collaboration among c...

The coronavirus pandemic has significantly disrupted information work across the globe. Since March 2020 when the World Health Organization designated Covid-19 as a pandemic, workplaces across the ...

Online labour platforms promise efficient, low-friction matching of workers with clients at scale and on-demand. Prior studies on Upwork have shown that the combination of specialized knowledge and expertise, high autonomy, and extent of client-worker engagement makes macrotasks a unique category of 'on-demand' work. However, there is a need to unpack the nature of macrotask work from the freelancers' perspective. Based on a qualitative study of 21 freelancers on Upwork, this paper fills this important gap by delineating how freelancers reason about accomplishing macrotasks, their interaction with clients, the key challenges that they face in various stages of the work process, and the strategies they devise to mitigate the costs and overhead. This paper shows that freelancers perceive accomplishing macrotasks as a collaborative achievement with the client. It also demonstrates that the skill-intensive nature of tasks implies that matching freelancer with the task/client is of enormous importance. It describes three programmatic solutions that the platform offers to facilitate the matching process along with their benefits and limitations. It, then, shows how freelancers seek to minimize the costs and work associated with matching and collaboration through repeat hiring along the benefits they result in. Lastly, the paper highlights how the same set of core issues is mirrored for both the freelancer and client sides of the market, which need to be addressed in order to enhance the ease and effectiveness of client-freelancer collaboration.

In recent years, research on collaborative interaction has relied on manual coding of rich audio/video recordings. The fine-grained analysis of such material is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is not only difficult to scale, but, as a result, might also limit the quality and completeness of coding due to fatigue, inherent human biases, (accidental or intentional), and inter-rater inconsistencies. In this paper, we explore how recent advances in machine learning may reduce manual effort and loss of information while retaining the value of human intelligence in the coding process. We present ACACIA (AI Chain for Augmented Collaborative Interaction Analysis), an AI video data analysis application which combines a range of advances in machine perception of video material for the analysis of collaborative interaction. We evaluate ACACIA's abilities, show how far we can already get, and which challenges remain. Our contribution lies in establishing a combined machine and human analysis pipeline that may be generalized to different collaborative settings and guide future research.

Virtual meetings are critical for remote work because of the need for synchronous collaboration in the absence of in-person interactions. In-meeting multitasking is closely linked to people’s productivity and wellbeing. However, we currently have limited understanding of multitasking in remote meetings and its potential impact. In this paper, we present what we believe is the most comprehensive study of remote meeting multitasking behavior through an analysis of a large-scale telemetry dataset collected from February to May 2020 of U.S. Microsoft employees and a 715-person diary study. Our results demonstrate that intrinsic meeting characteristics such as size, length, time, and type, significantly correlate with the extent to which people multitask, and multitasking can lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Our findings suggest important best-practice guidelines for remote meetings (e.g., avoid important meetings in the morning) and design implications for productivity tools (e.g., support positive remote multitasking).

Video-conferencing is essential for many companies, but its limitations in conveying social cues can lead to ineffective meetings. We present MeetingCoach, an intelligent post-meeting feedback dashboard that summarizes contextual and behavioral meeting information. Through an exploratory survey (N=120), we identified important signals (e.g., turn taking, sentiment) and used these insights to create a wireframe dashboard. The design was evaluated with in situ participants (N=16) who helped identify the components they would prefer in a post-meeting dashboard. After recording video-conferencing meetings of eight teams over four weeks, we developed an AI system to quantify the meeting features and created personalized dashboards for each participant. Through interviews and surveys (N=23), we found that reviewing the dashboard helped improve attendees’ awareness of meeting dynamics, with implications for improved effectiveness and inclusivity. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions for future feedback system designs of video-conferencing meetings.

The world is entering a new normal of hybrid organisations, in which it will be common that some members are co-located and others are remote. Hybridity is rife with asymmetries that affect our sense of belonging in an organisational space. This paper reports a study of an XR Telepresence technology probe to explore how remote workers might present themselves and be perceived as an equal and unique embodied being in a workplace. VROOM (Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings) augments a standard Mobile Robotic Telepresence experience by (1) adding a virtual avatar overlay of the remote person to the local space, viewable through a HoloLens worn by the local user, through which the remote user can gesture and express themselves, and (2) giving the remote user an immersive 360° view of the local space, captured by a 360° camera on the robot, which they can view through a VR headset. We ran a study to understand how pairs of participants (one local and one remote) collaborate using VROOM in a search and word-guessing game. Our findings illustrate that there is much potential for a system like VROOM to support dynamic collaborative activities in which embodiment, gesturing, mobility, spatial awareness, and non-verbal expressions are important. However, there are also challenges to be addressed, specifically around proprioception, the mixing of a physical robot body with a virtual human avatar, uncertainties of others' views and capabilities, fidelity of expressions, and the appearance of the avatar. We conclude with further design suggestions and recommendations for future work.

Participants in video meetings have long struggled with asymmetrical attention levels, especially when participants are distributed unevenly. While technological advances offer exciting opportunities to augment remote users' attention, the phenomenological complexity of attention means that to design attention-fostering features we must first understand what aspects of it are functionally meaningful to support. In this paper, we present a functional classification of observable attention for video meetings. The classification was informed by two studies on sense-making and selectiveness of attention in work meetings. It includes categories of attention accessible for technological support, their functions in a meeting process, and meeting-related activities that correspond to these functions. This classification serves as a multi-level representation of attention and informs the design of features aiming to support remote participants' attention in video meetings.

Despite sophisticated technologies for representational fidelity in hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants collaborate via video or audio, meetings are still often disrupted by practical problems with trying to include remote participants. In this paper, we use micro-analysis of three disruptive moments in a hybrid meeting from a global software company to unpack blended technological and conversational practices of inclusion and exclusion. We argue that designing truly valuable experiences for hybrid meetings requires moving from the traditional, essentialist, and perception-obsessed user-centered design approach to a phenomenological approach to the needs of meetings themselves. We employ the metaphor of 'configuring the meeting' to propose that complex ecologies of people, technology, spatial, and institutional organization must be made relevant in the process of design.

Via audiovisual communications and a controllable physical embodiment, Mobile Robotic telePresence (MRP) systems aim to support enhanced collaboration between remote and local members of a given setting. But MRP systems also put the remote user in positions where they frequently rely on the help of local partners. Getting or 'recruiting' such help can be done with various verbal and embodied actions ranging in explicitness. In this paper, we look at how such recruitment occurs in video data drawn from an experiment where pairs of participants (one local, one remote) performed a timed searching task. We find a prevalence of implicit recruitment methods and outline obstacles to effective recruitment that emerge due to communicative asymmetries that are built into MRP design. In a future where remote work becomes widespread, assistance through remote work technology like MRPs needs close examination at a fundamental interactional level, taking into account how communicative asymmetries are at play in everyday use of such technologies.

Corporations are increasingly empowering employees to hire on-demand workers via freelance platforms. We interviewed full-time employees of a global technology company who hired freelancers as part of their job responsibilities. While there has been prior work describing freelancers' perspectives there has been little research on those that hire them, the "clients", especially in the corporate context. We found that while freelance platforms reduce many administrative burdens, there are number of conditions in which using freelance platforms in a corporate context creates high transaction costs and power asymmetries that make it difficult for clients to negotiate work rights and responsibilities. This leads corporate employee clients to feel "stuck in the middle" between their employer, the platform, and the freelancer. Ultimately, these transactions costs are a potential barrier to wider adoption. If corporations want to leverage the value of the freelance economy then better guardrails, guidelines, and perhaps even creative technology solutions will be needed.

Traditional models of slideware assume one presenter controls attention through slide navigation and pointing while a passive audience views the action. This paradigm limits group interactions, curtailing opportunities for attendees to use slides to participate in a collaborative discourse. However, as slideware permeates contexts beyond simple one-to-many presentations, there are growing efforts to shift the dynamics of collocated interactions. Technologies exist to shift the one-to-many information control paradigm to variations that extend functions to multiple attendees. But there is limited detailed research on how to design such multi-person attentional control and facilitate collocated interactions without disrupting existing work practices. We report on a detailed naturalistic case of using presentation in a design meeting, where participants used Office Social, an experimental slideware technology that enabled open access to shared interaction with slides across multiple devices. We explore how the design of Office Social supported informal collaboration. Our video-based analysis reveals how the orderly structures of conversational turn-taking and bodily conduct were used in conjunction with the affordances of the socio-technical ecosystem to organize collective activity. We suggest that supporting collocated interactions should take account of the existing conversational methods for achieving orderly collaboration rather than superimposing prescriptive technological methods of order.

Slide presentations have long been stuck in a one-to-many paradigm, limiting audience engagement. Based on the concept of smartphone-based remote control of slide navigation, we present Office Social-a PowerPoint plugin and companion smartphone app that allows audience members qualified access to slides for personal review and, when the presenter enables it, public control over slide navigation. We studied the longitudinal use of Office Social across four meetings of a workgroup. We found that shared access and regulated control facilitated various forms of public and personal audience engagement. We discuss how enabling ad-hoc aggregation of co-proximate devices reduces 'interaction costs' and leads to both opportunities and challenges for presentation situations.

This paper reports on how asynchronous mobile video messaging presents users with a challenge to doing 'being ordinary'. 53 participants from three countries were recruited to try Skype Qik at launch for two weeks. Some participants embraced Skype Qik as a gift economy, emphasizing a special relationship enacted through crafted self-presentation. However, gift exchange makes up only a small proportion of conversation. Many participants struggled with the self-presentation obligations of video when attempting more everyday conversation. Faced with the 'tyranny of the everyday', many participants reverted to other systems where content forms reflected more lightweight exchange. We argue that designing for fluid control of the obligations of turn exchange is key to mobile applications intended to support everyday messaging.

Sonic Atomic Interaction Radio (SonicAIR) is an ambient awareness technology probe designed to explore how connecting the soundscapes of friends or family members might reduce the isolation of seniors living independently. At its core, SonicAIR instruments kitchen activity sites to produce an always-on real-time aural representation of remote domestic rhythms. This article reports how users in two pilot SonicAIR deployments used the sounds as resources for recognizing comfortable narratives of sociability. Used alongside telecare monitoring, such technologized interaction might enable older people to engage in community-oriented soundscape narratives of shared social responsibility.