MeetCues: Supporting Online Meetings Experience

TL;DR

MeetCues is a new platform that enhances online meetings by supporting subtle cues and engagement, leading to increased awareness and connection among participants.

Contribution

This paper introduces MeetCues, a novel visual and interactive platform that supports back-channel communication in online meetings, improving user engagement and experience.

Findings

Participants were more engaged during meetings.

Attendees felt more connected and aware.

The platform showed promise in enriching online communication.

Abstract

The remote work ecosystem is transforming patterns of communication between teams and individuals located at distance. Particularly, the absence of certain subtle cues in current communication tools may hinder an online's meeting outcome by negatively impacting attendees' overall experience and, often, make them feeling disconnected. The problem here might be due to the fact that current tools fall short in capturing it. To partly address this, we developed an online platform-MeetCues-with the aim of supporting online communication during meetings. MeetCues is a companion platform for a commercial communication tool with interactive and visual UI features that support back-channels of communications. It allows attendees to be more engaged during a meeting, and reflect in real-time or post-meeting. We evaluated our platform in a diverse set of five, real-world corporate meetings, and we found that, not only people were more engaged and aware during their meetings, but they also felt more connected. These findings suggest promise in the design of new communications tools, and reinforce the role of InfoVis in augmenting and enriching online meetings.