Beyond presentation: Shared slideware control as a resource for collocated collaboration

Authors: Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Francesca Salvadori, Kenton O'Hara, Sean Rintel
Venue: Human-Computer Interaction, 2018
Author's copy (PDF)

AThe study

Video case study of one real design meeting of about two hours. A freelance designer, her client and the client's adviser met in the client's house to choose a logo.

  1. One design meetingThe fourth and final meeting between a designer and her client, with three participants deciding on a logo for the client's startup.
  2. Slides everywhereThe slides were on a paper printout, the designer's laptop, a large television and each participant's phone.
  3. Four video streamsA room camera and a chest-mounted camera on each phone were aligned to show talk, bodies and slide control together.
  4. Close analysisTen fragments were analysed turn by turn for how control of the slides meshed with turns at talk.

BThe system

  1. Join from a phoneEach person joins the presentation from their phone with a session code, as presenter or attendee.
  2. Review privatelyAttendees get a private copy of the deck to follow, browse and bookmark without changing the shared screen.
  3. Open up controlThe presenter can switch on shared control for any attendee who opts in.
  4. Steer and pointAttendees move the shared slides and drag a pointer on the display from their phones, without asking anyone.next slideprevious slidepointer

The shared display does not show who is in control. The system was not compared with another system.

CWhat the study found

Sharing the slideshow attendees used control in the meeting studied

  • In the meeting studied, the designer opened shared control without breaking off the discussion.She switched it on as soon as an attendee began referring back to an earlier slide. No one asked for permission in words.
  • In the meeting studied, the client reviewed and bookmarked slides on her phone while others talked.She then brought those slides up on the shared television to discuss them with the group.
  • In the meeting studied, attendees pointed at fine details on the shared television from their seats.The display did not show who was pointing, so the others worked it out from context.

Keeping orderhow three people shared control with no technical rules

  • In the meeting studied, two people twice tried to change the shared slide at once.Once the client quietly let go while the designer made a point. Once the adviser said she was using it, and the designer gave way.
  • Participants kept order by reading each other's gaze, posture and talk.The system set no rules on who controlled the display. The paper notes this worked because only three people took part, and may not work in larger meetings.
  • The paper argues shared control blurred the line between presenter and audience.Attendees chose what the whole group looked at and pointed at what mattered to them.

DKey takeaway

People sharing slide control can take turns steering the display as they take turns talking. Small meeting tools may work best as open systems, leaving order to gaze, posture and conversation.

Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.

Abstract

Traditional models of slideware assume that one presenter controls attention through slide navigation and on-screen 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. This article reports on a detailed naturalistic case of using a presentation in a design meeting. In the meeting, participants used Office Social, an experimental slideware technology that enabled open access to attentional control across multiple devices. We explore the extent to which the design of Office Social supported informal collaboration. Our video-based analyses reveal how the orderly structures of conversational turn-taking and bodily conduct were used in conjunction with the affordances of the socio-technical ecosystem in the room 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.

Research brief

By Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Francesca Salvadori, Kenton O'Hara, and Sean Rintel.

Takeaway: Shared slides can rely on 'turn-taking in control' (taking turns at steering the display, as at talk). In a small meeting where anyone could steer from their phone, people kept order by reading each other's gaze, bodily conduct and talk.

Why this matters

What was known
Slideware is built for one presenter controlling the slides for a passive audience, which limits generative and evaluative group work. Systems that extend control to attendees exist. But there is limited detailed research on how to design such multi-person attentional control and facilitate collocated interactions without disrupting existing work practices. (Abstract, p. 3)
What this paper adds
Rather than testing features in a lab, we followed one real design meeting with a room camera and a camera on each phone. We analysed how taking turns at controlling the slides meshed with taking turns at talk. Our analysis revealed that the limited shared ownership of slides augmented participants' agency within the constraints of collocated talk, and order over shared document control was accomplished by talk and bodily conduct. (§5, p. 39)
Who it matters to
Designers of slideware and of technologies for collocated, multi-device meetings. (§5, p. 39)

Research questions

Method and data

Design
Naturalistic case study of one design review meeting using Office Social (see Prototype). Qualitative multimodal video analysis of talk, bodily conduct and slide control in ten fragments, drawing on conversation-analytic turn-taking.
Prototype
Office Social, an experimental add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint with a companion smartphone app, built on Microsoft's Office Remote. The presenter's PC runs a local server that several phones join with a session code, as presenter or attendee. Attendees start in Review Mode: a private copy of the deck on their phone that they can follow along with, browse on their own and bookmark, without changing the shared screen. When a presenter turns on Interaction Mode, any attendee who opts in can move the shared slides forward and back, and drag a single on-screen pointer by touching their phone, without asking anyone. The display does not show who is in control. It was not compared with another system.
A slide shown on a large display and on a laptop connected to it (A), with a smartphone (B) mirroring the same slide above large forward and back arrows and a 'presentation mode' bar.
Figure 1. Office Social is designed as a PowerPoint add-in (A) and a companion smartphone app (B). When a slideshow is launched, the slide on the laptop screen is mirrored on the presenter's smartphone and the public display. Henceforth, the presenter can use Office Social as a remote control during the presentation. From the paper, Fig. 1, p. 10.
Setting
The fourth and final meeting between a freelance designer and her client, in the client's house, deciding on a logo for the client's startup. Slides were available on a paper printout, the designer's laptop, a large television display and all three participants' phones.
Participants / data
Three participants: the designer Sara (female, 26), her client Zoe (female, 26) and Zoe's friend and adviser Mel (female, 30).
Duration
The meeting lasted approximately two hours.
Analysis
A room camera and chest-mounted GoPro cameras on each phone. The four video streams were aligned for multimodal analysis of talk, bodily conduct and slide control, transcribed with a simplified Jefferson system.

Findings

Questions this paper answers

Does letting everyone control the slides in a meeting cause chaos?
Not necessarily. People can take turns steering a shared display much as they take turns at talk, reading each other's gaze, posture and speech. In a real design meeting with no technical floor control, two clashes over the slides were repaired, once by someone giving way and once by talk. (See §4.3, p. 36; §4.3, p. 36.)
Does it matter that a shared screen does not show who is controlling it?
Not much in a small meeting. People worked out who was navigating or pointing from each other's gaze, bodies and talk. That relied on there being only three people, and probably would not work in much larger meetings. (See §4.4, p. 38; §4.3, p. 36.)
Why would attendees want their own copy of the slides during a meeting?
It lets them think separately without leaving the conversation. A private copy let attendees reflect on slides and plan their next contribution. They could then put the right slide on the shared screen at the right moment to bring the group with them. (See §4.3, p. 37; §4.3, p. 37.)

Contributions and implications

Limitations

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Concepts

Open system
Hewitt's concept, on which Office Social's design draws: a non-prescriptive system that enables articulation work, i.e., supports meeting participants to manage prevailing work practices instead of disrupting them by imposing new workflows (§2, p. 11)
Tightly and loosely coupled collaboration
A spectrum from CSCW research (e.g., Gutwin and Greenberg) that we use for meeting work around shared slides: Collaborative action in these settings can be seen as ranging from very tightly coupled action to more loose couplings of action depending on the extent of coordination, synchrony, and action dependency. (§1.1, p. 7)
Review Mode and Interaction Mode
In Office Social, attendees can privately review and bookmark a copy of the deck (Review Mode), or, once a presenter enables it, navigate and point on the public display (Interaction Mode). (§2, p. 12)
Turn-taking in control
Our analytic focus: we focus on how turn-taking in control (i.e., turn-taking in controlling a document on the public display) interplays with turn-taking in talk (§3.2, p. 14)

Figures

A slide shown on a large display and on a laptop connected to it (A), with a smartphone (B) mirroring the same slide above large forward and back arrows and a 'presentation mode' bar.
Figure 1. Office Social is designed as a PowerPoint add-in (A) and a companion smartphone app (B). When a slideshow is launched, the slide on the laptop screen is mirrored on the presenter's smartphone and the public display. Henceforth, the presenter can use Office Social as a remote control during the presentation. From the paper, Fig. 1, p. 10.
Four phone screens: a slide with forward and back arrows labelled interaction mode (A), the same slide bookmarked in review mode (B), an attendee in interaction mode (C), and a list of favourite slides (D).
Figure 2. Different states available in the smartphone app, a presenter in Interaction Mode (A) with either attendee in Review Mode (B) or Interaction Mode (C). A list of bookmarked slides (D). From the paper, Fig. 2, p. 11.

How to cite

Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Francesca Salvadori, Kenton O'Hara, and Sean Rintel. 2018. Beyond presentation: Shared slideware control as a resource for collocated collaboration. Human-Computer Interaction 33 (5-6), 455-498. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2017.1388170

This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.

BibTeX

@article{chattopadhyay2018beyond,
author = {Chattopadhyay, Debaleena and Salvadori, Francesca and O'Hara, Kenton and Rintel, Sean},
title = {Beyond presentation: Shared slideware control as a resource for collocated collaboration},
year = {2018},
month = {January},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2017.1388170},
pages = {455-498},
journal = {Human-Computer Interaction},
volume = {33},
number = {5-6},
doi = {10.1080/07370024.2017.1388170},
}