Videoconference fatigue: a conceptual analysis

Videoconferencing (VC) is a type of online meeting that allows two or more participants from different locations to engage in live multi-directional audio-visual communication and collaboration (e.g., via screen sharing). The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a boom in both private and professional videoconferencing in the early 2020s that elicited controversial public and academic debates about its pros and cons. One main concern has been the phenomenon of videoconference fatigue. The aim of this conceptual review article is to contribute to the conceptual clarification of VC fatigue. We use the popular and succinct label “Zoom fatigue” interchangeably with the more generic label “videoconference fatigue” and define it as the experience of fatigue during and/or after a videoconference, regardless of the specific VC system used. We followed a structured eight-phase process of conceptual analysis that led to a conceptual model of VC fatigue with four key causal dimensions: (1) personal factors, (2) organizational factors, (3) technological factors, and (4) environmental factors. We present this 4D model describing the respective dimensions with their sub-dimensions based on theories, available evidence, and media coverage. The 4D-model is meant to help researchers advance empirical research on videoconference fatigue

Strategies to Expand and Obtain Funding for Nonprofit Organizations

Expanding a nonprofit organization (NPO) can be beneficial to the community; however, such expansion comes with challenges, including finding ways to obtain additional funding and understanding which additional services to provide. A single-case study was conducted to explore the challenges facing a nonprofit behavioral health organization as it seeks to obtain funding to expand current services and identify new services for underserved communities. Data were collected through interviews with the behavioral health leader (BHL) and five staff members using the Baldrige excellence framework. Five themes emerged from the data analysis: access, programs, services, funding, workforce, and leadership. Although leadership was strong, the remaining themes offered strengths and weaknesses as further reviewed using a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis. Some themes fell into two or more categories, such as the need for a larger facility being a financial concern and a potential weakness; however, the ability to choose a location near public access was a strength. Additional data were obtained from the BHL, publicly available information, meeting minutes, and the NPO’s strategic plan. Partnerships with government and county entities, medical facilities, and possibly for-profit organizations that align with the mission and vision of the nonprofit behavioral health organization in this study will facilitate its expansion plans and simplify access to more funding. By entering these partnerships, the organization will be able to decide which services it can add that will benefit community members. The positive social change implications of the study are better community access to services, improved coping skills, fewer mental health hospitalizations, and additional employment and training opportunities for therapeutic staff

Video Collaboration: Copresence and Performance

The purpose of this qualitative narrative theory study on video collaboration platform use is to explain how an individual\u27s on-screen performance and their interpersonal verbal and nonverbal communication contributes to engagement and copresence with their audience. The literature review analyzes critical interpersonal communication theories to explain how this affects engagement and copresence levels in mediated virtual environments. The research was conducted through interviews with thirty professional businesspeople about their video collaboration experiences during the COVID-19 2020 shutdown. The interview respondents told the stories of business communication successes and failures that correspond to the scholarly theories in the literature review. The respondents discussed how verbal and nonverbal communication was used successfully and unsuccessfully. They also discussed why their companies found it challenging to communicate virtually during the COVID-19 shutdown with video collaboration. A final discussion analyzes how communication theory and practical experience combined to explain how verbal and nonverbal communication impact mediated virtual communications when using video collaboration. This study offers a model to help explain how interpersonal communication, engagement, and copresence exist in a cyclical motion. This model can be helpful to business people and scholars to communicate in a mediated virtual environment using video collaboration platforms

An evaluation of the effectiveness of communication between the education district office and schools in Nelson Mandela Bay

This study focuses on an evaluation of communication effectiveness between the school administration office in Nelson Mandela Bay and its representative schools in advancing the business case of school development and heightened learner experience in line with the national development goal. The research uses a qualitative research approach to gather rich insights into the challenges, opportunities and problems that heighten and affect the quality of communication methods, channels and the roles of communication that the interviewed stakeholders representing both the district and schools depict and understand within the communication processes and methods used. Fourteen interviewees were identified using a judgemental and purposive sampling technique. They were identified from the Nelson Mandela Bay district office and schools within the district. Findings from the study reveal that the critical areas of concern include the roles of communication, stakeholder roles in the communication process, methods of communication, and challenges in communication effectiveness. While schools and the district office share the responsibility for providing quality education, it is critical that an effective communication strategy, which embraces computer-mediated communication as a supplementary tool, should be adopted to ensure that this shared mandate could be achieved

An evaluation of the effectiveness of communication between the education district office and schools in Nelson Mandela Bay

This study focuses on an evaluation of communication effectiveness between the school administration office in Nelson Mandela Bay and its representative schools in advancing the business case of school development and heightened learner experience in line with the national development goal. The research uses a qualitative research approach to gather rich insights into the challenges, opportunities and problems that heighten and affect the quality of communication methods, channels and the roles of communication that the interviewed stakeholders representing both the district and schools depict and understand within the communication processes and methods used. Fourteen interviewees were identified using a judgemental and purposive sampling technique. They were identified from the Nelson Mandela Bay district office and schools within the district. Findings from the study reveal that the critical areas of concern include the roles of communication, stakeholder roles in the communication process, methods of communication, and challenges in communication effectiveness. While schools and the district office share the responsibility for providing quality education, it is critical that an effective communication strategy, which embraces computer-mediated communication as a supplementary tool, should be adopted to ensure that this shared mandate could be achieved

An empirical study of the effectiveness of telepresence as a business meeting mode

Telepresence is a technology that has emerged as a promising mode for conducting business meetings with distributed participants, since it enables an immersive lifelike experience. However, telepresence meetings are substantially more expensive than audio- and video-conferencing meetings. This paper examines the justification of using telepresence for meetings. Based on an extensive literature review, two research questions about the effectiveness of telepresence for achieving meeting objectives are formulated. These are then addressed in an empirical study consisting of two phases, conducted in a large multinational corporation in which telepresence is widely used. In Phase 1, a list of meeting objectives is compiled. In Phase 2, the effectiveness of telepresence is analyzed relative to audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, and face-to-face for these objectives, based on input from 392 meeting organizers. The results of the analysis indicate that although the effectiveness of telepresence is higher than the effectiveness of audio- and video-conferencing for several meeting objectives, it is not significantly different from the effectiveness of face-to-face for any objective

Mediated participatory design for contextually aware in-vehicle user-experiences with autonomous vehicles

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis study reports on the empirical findings of a series of participatory design workshops for the development of a supportive automotive user experience design system. Identifying and addressing this area with traditional research methods is problematic due to the different user experience (UX) design perspectives that might conflict and the related limitations of the automotive domain. Consequently, we deploy a pragmatic epistemological paradigm and apply participatory prototyping methods to resolve this problem. We conduct two iterations of design and evaluation with 19 user experience (UX) designers through individual participatory prototyping activities to gain insights into their explicit, observable, tacit and latent needs. We describe the design of a toolkit tailored to the character of the study to be used in relevant studies of ill-defined or wicked problems. The participatory design activities initially allowed us to explore the motivation to use different technologies, the system’s architecture, detailed features of interactivity, and to describe our users’ needs. As a result, our first analysis of data led us to design implications that translate participants’ needs into UX goals. We use these UX goals for the design of goal-directed personas and scenarios of use as actionable insights to develop our system. A medium-fidelity functional prototype of our system was then evaluated, while contextually aware automotive UX practitioners criticised our design decisions. Some of the essential findings when supporting the contextual understanding are generating new knowledge to inform both theory and practice. The results propose that most automotive UX designers are ready to adopt technologies that use sensitive physiological measures such as eyes, face, body tracking using cameras and computer vision. In contrast, non-automotive UX designers who empathise with the passengers and the drivers and perceive the in-vehicle space as something more private are suggesting that this might affect people’s trust. The majority agrees to collect data and communicate with the users using implicit and explicit context, as a way to support UX design in the autonomous vehicles would require the consent of the passengers. Even though UX designers suggested a general interest in the social and temporal context of the interactions, the limitations of privacy and safety in the vehicle limit them in collecting task-related contextual data leaving the social, temporal, and physical context unexplored. Safety is arguably a factor that will not restrict the future of autonomous driving experiences research and design since there is no cognitive demand on level five autonomy which hands the passengers with plenty of other options when not driving, assuming that they are ready to trust a fully automated system. However, our study does not provide us with a direction on the privacy of autonomous vehicle experiences and whether privacy will continue being a limitation in the context of self-driving vehicles. Thus, we would recommend further research on trust and privacy in fully automated vehicles. We conclude by discussing the design implications and functional tools of our system, including 1) a video tagging tool that supports saving an occurrence identified momentarily on real-time video. 2) A privacy call-wall which uses implicit and explicit context to avoid intrusiveness in private situations. 3) A human-like avatar tool for mitigating privacy issues, and 4) an interactive interviewing tool to support communication between UXers and the passengers of autonomous vehicles. Finally, 5) exploration tools, including a tool for searching participants’ characteristics and target groups of people. We further inform the body of knowledge in participatory UX and HCI methods about the advantages of our methodological approach and the limitations of using it. We discuss why involving non-experts in co-design activities using toolkits tailored to the domain of interest is valuable. Furthermore, we extensively address how, and we give directions for the design of similar toolkits by describing the toolkit that we designed and applied in our study. Conclusively we discuss the broader implications of trust and privacy in other domains and how this related to our findings