Smartphone Use Does Not Have to Be Rude: Making Phones a Collaborative Presence in Meetings

Matthias BöhmerT. Scott SaponasJaime Teevan

MobileHCI 2013, Munich, Germany

Motivation

We wanted to enhance enterprise meetings with a mobile application.

Motivation-People often mentally leave meeting context

when using non-meeting / non-work apps-How can we turn meeting-unrelated smartphone

use into meeting-related smartphone use?- Idea: provide a game that...

-enhances face to face interaction in enterprise meetings-helps people getting to know each other better-creates fun (since fun positively impacts work)

Related Work

Related Work- Use of technology in meetings

-People use phones for lecture-unrelated content (Iqbal et al. [8])-Phone use in meetings might be perceived as rude/impolite,

but also efficient when used as a tool (Kleinman [12])

- Social networks at work-People are more motivated to connect to unknown people in

corporate social networks (DiMicco et al. [4])-Social networks can create and strengthen ties behind

corporate firewalls (Skeels and Grudin [18])

- Social games for professional relationships-SNAG (Powell et al. [16])-Collabio (Bernstein et al. [1])-GuessWho (Guy et al. [7])

Online Survey

... to learn about how people use their smartphones in meetings

Online Survey-398 people randomly recruited from Microsoft HQ

-85 women, 298 men, rest non-disclosed)-Average age 39 years (min 22, max 66, SD 8.14)

-We asked people about phone use in-their last meeting-their average meeting-what they think others do

-5 meeting types:-Conversation-Status update-Presentation-Brainstorming-Training

App Usage in Meetings-Most used apps: email, calendar, SMS -People think they would be productive on their

phones while others would be messing around Last Meeting Others in Meeting

% % Email 86.0 93.8

Calendar 61.0 62.3

Short messaging 22.7 56.0

Looking up things 22.7 48.3

Reminders & to-dos 16.9 30.3

Taking pictures 12.8 21.8

Taking notes 11.6 17.0

Browsing the Web 9.3 45.3

Phone calls 4.7 16.0

Social networks 3.5 36.5

Playing games 2.9 17.5

-Work-related usage correlates with...-notes applications-reminders and to-do applications

-Non-work related usage correlates with...-social networking applications- Internet browsing

-Correlations between applications...-When using a notes application, people are also more

likely to use a reminders / to-do application-When using a browser, people are also more likely to play

games or use social networks

Work and Non-work Usage

Findings: Type and Size of Meeting -Meeting type impacts if phone is used

-51.6% in presentation meetings-48.3% in status updates-42.2% in brainstorming meetings-26.3% in conversation meetings-0% in trainings

-Meeting type impacts for what phone is used-Pictures most likely taken in brainstorming meetings-The more people in a meeting, the more likely people

searched for something on the Internet

-Participants thought...-that phone use hampers social interaction with others -not so much that phone use hampers productivity

Design of Meetster

... a social mobile application to stimulate social interaction between people

People Engine

-People engine pulls data about attendees from internal corporate directories and external sources

-People engine creates trivia questions and hints based on templates

People Engine- attendee list

- extracted data - question templates

Trivia Qs

Hints

personal data

org chart

web search data

...

...

Mobile Application

-Meetings attendees sign in to join the game-Players get trivia questions and can ask for hints-Leaderboard provides details about people

a) sign in b) trivia questions and hints c) leaderboard and people cards

Study of Meetster

... to investigate how people use Meetster and its impact on corporate meetings

Study Setup-We studied the use of Meetster in 9 real meetings-114 participants (13 female, 62 male, rest n/a)

-Average meeting had 12.7 attendees (SD 8.2)-575 minutes of meeting time in total

-Between subject A/B/C design-3 meetings: attendee list-3 meetings: trivia game-3 meetings: trivia game with hints

-Data collection-Logging data-Manual annotations-Survey data

Overall Usage of Meetster-Overall people...

-answered 2,100+ trivia questions-peeked at 46 hints-viewed 720 people profiles

-Application was used...-heavily at beginning of meetings-restrained during primary content of meetings-boosts when meeting was interrupted

Log Data All of the participants’ interactions with the application were logged, including when users joined the system and when people cards were shown. When game functionality was available, we tracked users’ movement between differ-ent views, which questions were displayed, how the ques-tions were answered, and which ones they skipped. Addi-tionally, we tracked hint use when available. Since the du-ration of the meetings in the study varied, we normalized the timestamps of events in the logs by the length of the meeting. For example, when looking at the timing of an-swers, we studied answers per normalized time-period.

Manual Annotation In addition to logging data automatically within the applica-tion, we also manually logged meeting events. A member of our research team attended each meeting as an observer and kept track of: people using their personal devices, when there was laughter, whether laughter was related to the Meetster system, and when people showed the test devices to other people. The observer also assessed the degree to which people seemed to have fun. Additionally we manual-ly kept track of the duration of the meeting and the meet-ing’s type.

Survey Data Meeting participants were also asked to fill out several sur-veys. Before and after the meeting, participants were asked via email to report how well they knew the other attendees, on a 5-point scale using a list of attendees provided by the meeting organizer. This survey was optional, and filled out by relatively few participants. Additionally, at the end of each meeting participants were provided with a paper-based questionnaire that asked them about their Meetster use dur-ing the meeting. Participants were given the option to pro-vide their corporate ID, which allows us to their link survey responses with the log data.

Participants We studied the three different Meetster variants (Attendee Lists, Trivia, and Trivia with Hints) following an A/B/C study design with between subject tests. We deployed each variant in three meetings, for a total of nine meetings. We distributed the conditions over a mix of four status update meetings and five presentation meetings. On average, 12.7 people attended a meeting (min 5, max 29, SD 8.2). We recruited participants by reaching out to people who were organizing upcoming meetings within the research depart-ment of a large software company. We provided a small gratuity in the form of snacks we brought to the meeting. The study was conducted in July 2012.

Not every meeting attendee in every meeting used the Meetster system. This was because we were not able to provide a phone to everybody in the largest meetings, and because some people only attended a small part of meet-ings. As such, we did not collect any survey or log data from these people, even though they might have had an impact on the social context of the meeting. Since we made

it optional for participants to enter their personal ID into the survey form (due to privacy concerns) we cannot relate every log record to a participant. For our study we have collected survey and log data from 63 people, only survey data from 17 people, and only log data from 31 people. We have data from participants who filled out the survey from 22 people for the Meetster Attendee List application, 29 people for the Meetster Trivia and 29 people for the Meetster Trivia with Hints.

We had 62 male and 13 female participants (rest unknown). One participant was younger than 20, 27 were in their 20s, 25 in their 30s, 14 in their 40s, 6 in their 50s, and one per-son older than or equal to 60 (rest unknown).

MEETSTER STUDY RESULTS Overall, participants used the Meetster system in their meetings to get to know other attendees, learning more about each other the more they used it. Game elements in-creased participants’ engagement, both with the system and with each other, but also tended to distract people from the meeting content. In this section, we dive more deeply into these findings to show which features were most successful for helping people learn about one another, engage in the meeting content, and engage in social interaction.

Overview Table 3 gives a general overview on usage of the Meetster applications during the study. In total, we studied 575 minutes of meeting time. During these approximately 9.5 hours of meetings, 114 participants opened more than 720 people profiles, answered more than 2,100 trivia questions, and peeked at 46 hints.

As can be seen in Table 3, Meetster functionality use varied by condition. The Attendee List was primarily viewed when it was the only functionality available. Participants in this condition viewed the Attendee List almost 20 times each, which is larger than the number of meeting attendees. Many contact cards were viewed more than once.

When the game was available, participants interacted with the system more, but did so by answering questions versus by visiting the Attendee List. Each attendee in the Trivia condition answered 25 questions on average, and each at-tendee in the Trivia with Hints condition answered 30 ques-tions on average. Answer speed differed significantly be-tween the game without and with hints (Independent-Samples Kruskal-Wallis Test, p<.05), with a mean of 0.65

Attendee Lists Trivia Trivia w/

Hints Total

# of meetings 3 3 3 9 Total meeting time 220 min 170 min 185 min 575 min # of participants 34 39 41 114 # views people cards 679 12 31 722 # of answers - 971 1,214 2,185 # of hints viewed - - 46 46

Table 3: Characteristics of Meetster usage during study.

Learning about Other Attendees-Meetster helps to learn something about people

-The more questions people played, the more they learned about others

-The more hints people pulled, the better they have been introduced to new people

-The variant with only the attendee list helped best getting to know people for those who did not know everybody

-The two game variants...-resulted in more fun-were more engaging-were more distracting

-Providing hints emphasized these effects-more fun, more engaging, more distracting

Fun and Distraction

Social Engagement

-Trivia questions made experience more social- In game version with hints...

-people showed around the app more often-people talked about content more often

-The faster people played, the more often they asked for help

Discussion and Conclusion

Discussion and Future Work- Introduce rounds with fixed ends-We experimented with interactive tasks

-e.g. leveraging camera for taking pictures of others

- Incorporate other (corporate) social networks-Play across different companies (e.g. with Yammer)-Extend game for getting to know people in other

contexts (e.g. at a party)

-Crowdsource information through the game-Ask people to enter new information (e.g. hobbies)-Leverage questions to verify new data

-Survey of smartphone use in meetings-Meeting type impacts smartphone use-Phone use hampers interaction with others-Productive on own phone / others mess around

-Design of Meetster-Mobile social trivia game-People engine crawls data from corporate directories-Generates trivia questions, hints, leaderboard

-Study of Meetster in meetings-Attendee list helps to get to know new people -Game elements create greater engagement w/ app -Game creates greater engagement w/ other attendees

Conclusion

Smartphone Use Does Not Have to Be Rude: Making Phones a Collaborative Presence in Meetings

Matthias BöhmerT. Scott SaponasJaime Teevan

Thank you!