(Re)Configuring Hybrid Meetings: Moving from User-Centered Design to Meeting-Centered Design

Best Paper
Authors: Banu Saatçi, Kaya Akyüz, Sean Rintel, Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose
Venue: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2020
Author's copy (PDF)

AThe study

Conversation analysis of one recorded hybrid status meeting on Microsoft Teams in 2018 at a global software company in the United Kingdom. Eleven people were in the room and two joined remotely.

  1. One meeting recordedA 90-minute status and brainstorming meeting, with a wall screen for remote participants and a 360° camera on the table.
  2. Three breakdownsThree episodes of technology trouble during the status round were selected for close analysis.
  3. Close transcriptionEach episode was transcribed in fine detail, including relevant physical actions.
  4. Moment by moment analysisEach episode was analysed for how talk and technology led to remote participants being included or excluded.

BWhat the study found

How breakdowns played outthree episodes in one recorded meeting

  • In this meeting, a remote colleague's silence with camera off was read as inattention.The room questioned whether he was paying attention, and the manager teased him to turn his video on.
  • In this meeting, turning the camera on did not earn the remote colleague a turn.When his video came on, the meeting moved straight on, leaving him a passive participant.
  • The manager included remote participants by treating the wall screen as a seat at the table.This inclusive move had a cost for the remote participants, who could not see when their turn would come.
  • After repeated sound and video failures, the manager closed a remote report as having got the gist.No other channel, such as chat or a phone line, was offered. The authors treat this as a form of exclusion.

What the pattern showsthe paper's analysis and argument

  • In this meeting, moving on to share time equally did not give equal chances to report.The remote colleague was partly excluded, and even people in the room did not get equal time afterwards.
  • In this meeting, participants handled each breakdown in whatever way kept the meeting moving.Participants fixed breakdowns, let them pass or worked them into the talk, even at a remote colleague's expense.
  • The paper argues design should configure the whole meeting, not just each user.The authors propose making a meeting's order of talk, expected behaviour and technical state visible to everyone.

CKey takeaway

Meeting-centered design can make hybrid meetings more inclusive by configuring the meeting itself, showing everyone its turn order, expected behaviour and technical state. Otherwise people may keep meetings on track by sidelining remote colleagues the technology fails.

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

Abstract

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.

Research brief

By Banu Saatçi, Kaya Akyüz, Sean Rintel, and Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose.

Takeaway: Meeting-centered design can make hybrid meetings more inclusive by configuring the meeting itself, not just the user. It makes the meeting's turn order, expected behaviour and technical state visible to everyone. Otherwise people keep meetings on track by sidelining remote colleagues whom the technology fails.

Why this matters

What was known
Research spread across studies of online, remote, virtual and distributed meetings and work has had one main focus, yet meetings still stall when remote participants have technology trouble. has focused on remote participant fidelity and equality of local and remote participation (§2, pp. 2–3)
What this paper adds
Rather than improving how well remote people are seen and heard, we analyse moment by moment how one real meeting handled three breakdowns. We borrow the idea of 'configuring' from science and technology studies to move the design target from the individual user to the meeting. our suggested design implication is to think about these aspects and others as 'configuring the meeting' and not just the users (§6.2.4, p. 19)
Who it matters to
Designers of hybrid meeting software and hardware, and the organisations and teams that rely on hybrid meetings. Designing flexible hybrid meeting services and hardware for 'configuring the meeting' is essential to meeting institutional goals and needs (§6.3, pp. 21–22)

Research question

Method and data

Design
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA): micro-analysis of three episodes of technological trouble leading to inclusion or exclusion of remote participants, all drawn from the meeting's status round.
Setting
A single hybrid status-update and brainstorming meeting in 2018 at a global software company in the United Kingdom, using Microsoft Teams, a wall screen for remote participants, and a Microsoft RoundTable 360° panoramic camera on the table.
Participants / data
11 co-located participants and two remote participants, plus two observers (one a co-author).
Duration
One 90-min-long video recording.
Analysis
Episodes transcribed with Jefferson's transcription system, noting relevant physical details, and analysed for sequential sociotechnical dynamics.

Findings

Questions this paper answers

Why do remote participants get left out of hybrid meetings?
Often not through neglect but through efforts to keep the meeting moving. When technology fails, a remote person's silence can be read as inattention. A room under time pressure may decide it has heard enough rather than wait or switch to another channel. (See §5.1, p. 7; §5.3, p. 16; §6, p. 16.)
Does turning your camera on in a hybrid meeting make you more included?
Not necessarily. In a recorded status meeting at a software company, with eleven people in the room and two remote, the room insisted on one remote participant's video. But once it came on, the meeting moved on without him, leaving him included only as a passive participant. (See §5.1, p. 7; §5.1, p. 10.)
Is giving everyone equal speaking time enough to make a hybrid meeting fair?
No. In a recorded status meeting at a software company, the manager moved on, possibly so everyone got their slot, cutting short a remote colleague whose sound and video kept failing. Equal time is not an equitable chance to contribute, especially when technical trouble falls on one side. (See §5.3, p. 16; §5.3, p. 16.)

Contributions and implications

Limitations

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Concepts

Inclusion
Our definition: By inclusion, we mean episodes in which the meeting continuity is disrupted either to organize the participation of a remote user, or to organize meeting tasks around a spatial orientation that accounts for both remote and local participants. (§1, pp. 1–2)
Exclusion
Our definition, the counterpart of inclusion: we refer to episodes in which meeting continuity is itself organized to accountably exclude remote participants during or following a technological breakdown (§1, pp. 1–2)
Configuring
Borrowed from Woolgar and extended here from users to the meeting. Woolgar's account: considers the design of a technology to be a process of 'configuring' that 'includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions' (§2, pp. 4–5)
Meeting-centered design
Designing for the meeting as a social phenomenon with its own needs, rather than for individual users' perception of fidelity. We suggest that the individual user alone should not be 'configured' since the meeting itself configures the participants in different ways. (§6.3, pp. 21–22)
Asymmetries of hybrid meetings
Following Heath and Luff, video adds its own asymmetries to the physical, social and cultural ones already dividing the room from remote participants. We treat them as a problem that keeps remote people at a disadvantage, and breakdowns make it worse: Technological breakdowns exacerbate, and are exacerbated by, such asymmetries. (§2, p. 4)

Figures

Floor plan of the meeting room: co-located participants and the manager around a table with a RoundTable camera at its centre, a screen showing two remote participants and one co-located participant, and two observers with cameras.
Figure 1. The hybrid meeting setting: Black (participants) and yellow (observers) denote individuals present in the room, green and orange figures on the screen denote remote participants. A Microsoft Roundtable 360° panoramic camera is located in the middle of the table. From the paper, Fig. 1, p. 6.

How to cite

Banu Saatçi, Kaya Akyüz, Sean Rintel, and Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose. 2020. (Re)Configuring Hybrid Meetings: Moving from User-Centered Design to Meeting-Centered Design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 29, 769-794. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-020-09385-x

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{saati2020re,
author = {Saatçi, Banu and Akyüz, Kaya and Rintel, Sean and Klokmose, Clemens Nylandsted},
title = {(Re)Configuring Hybrid Meetings: Moving from User-Centered Design to Meeting-Centered Design},
year = {2020},
month = {November},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-020-09385-x},
pages = {769-794},
journal = {Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)},
volume = {29},
doi = {10.1007/s10606-020-09385-x},
}