Exploring How Workspace Awareness Cues Affect Distributed Meeting Outcome

Abstract

Nowadays, using the online whiteboard to share knowledge in distributed meetings has become a common practice. Existing studies and practices have attempted to visualize attendees’ interactive activities in whiteboard tools to support the virtual team’s workspace awareness (WA). However, the impact of such visual cues on meeting success remains unclear. For this purpose, we primarily explore whether and to what extent WA cues are conducive to meeting outcome. This study applies activity theory to guide our prototype design and research analysis. A customized web-based whiteboard interface is implemented under two conditions. We conduct a study with 42 subjects in a distributed meeting scenario via a controlled experiment. Also, we analyze the system affordance via user experience. The results demonstrate that the benefits of WA cues to meeting outcome are especially embodied in goal attainment and quality of contributions, but not effectively supported in productivity and user satisfaction. Moreover, subjects report that they do not feel distracted by the system’s visual cues because they do not notice those cues most of the time and use them only when needed. Drawing upon findings from our trial work, we provide several implications for designing a collaborative knowledge-sharing environment to assist the visual support of WA in distributed meetings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.mural.co

2 https://lucidspark.com

3 https://conceptboard.com

4 https://miro.com

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61932007.

Notes on contributors

Fangyu Yu

Fangyu Yu is currently a Ph.D student in the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Her research interests include Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Peng Zhang

Peng Zhang received the Ph.D. degree in Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2018. He is now an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, Fudan University. His research interests include Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing and Human-Centered Natural Language Processing.

Xianghua Ding

Xianghua Ding is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing Science at University of Glasgow, UK. Before joining the University of Glasgow, she was an associate professor at Fudan University in China. Her research is in the areas of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing.

Tun Lu

Tun Lu is now a professor in the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His research interests include Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Collaborative and Social Computing, and Human-Computer Interaction.

Ning Gu

Ning Gu is currently a professor in the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His research interests include Human-Centered Cooperative Computing, Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, and Human-Computer Interaction.