Fatigued by yourself? Towards understanding the impact of self-view designs in virtual meeting software

Video meetings are essential for our life. Besides their relevance and advantages, users increasingly observe the negative phenomenon of virtual meeting fatigue (VMF). VMF is described as the feeling of exhaustion during virtual meetings when overusing virtual meeting software. Virtual meeting software presents additional technical stimuli that are not present in offline meetings and require additional cognitive resources. One of these stimuli is the self view feature, a mirrored image of oneself shown during the meeting which allows controlling the personal appearance. However, research is scarce about the trade off between the benefits of control and the disadvantages of the additional cognitive load of the self view. In our pilot study with 17 participants, we want to understand the impact of three self view designs (self view on, off, initial) on users’ cognitive load, self awareness, perceived control, and VMF. Therefore, we propose a research model and report initial results

Aligning Crowdworker Perspectives and Feedback Outcomes in Crowd-Feedback System Design

Leveraging crowdsourcing in software development has received growing attention in research and practice. Crowd feedback offers a scalable and flexible way to evaluate software design solutions and the potential of crowd-feedback systems has been demonstrated in different contexts by existing research studies. However, previous research lacks a deep understanding of the effects of individual design features of crowd-feedback systems on feedback quality and quantity. Additionally, existing studies primarily focused on understanding the requirements of feedback requesters but have not fully explored the qualitative perspectives of crowd-based feedback providers. In this paper, we address these research gaps with two research studies. In study 1, we conducted a feature analysis (N=10) and concluded that from a user perspective, a crowd-feedback system should have five core features (scenario, speech-to-text, markers, categories, and star rating). In the second study, we analyzed the effects of the design features on crowdworkers’ perceptions and feedback outcomes (N=210). We learned that offering feedback providers scenarios as the context of use is perceived as most important. Regarding the resulting feedback quality, we discovered that more features are not always better as overwhelming feedback providers might decrease feedback quality. Offering feedback providers categories as inspiration can increase the feedback quantity. With our work, we contribute to research on crowd-feedback systems by aligning crowdworker perspectives and feedback outcomes and thereby making the software evaluation not only more scalable but also more human-centered

The Relationship of Collaboration Technologies and Cognition and Affect

Collaboration technologies (CT) are integral for today’s workplaces and the use of CT impacts human brain and behavior. The consequences on cognition and affect of CT users have been empirically investigated since the 1970s. However, the research landscape is scattered and a comprehensive overview is missing. Consequently, we systematically analyze research about the relationship of CT and cognitive and affective user states and processes through an advanced systematic literature review based on the conceptual foundation of the time-space matrix, the stimulus-organism-response paradigm, and the workplace outcomes framework. Our results show an increase in remote CT, alongside a focus on individual analysis and affective constructs, while group level studies concentrate relatively stronger on collocated scenarios. We contribute with avenues for future research like the underrepresentation of group level analysis, a need for unified conceptualization and understanding of cognitive and affective constructs in theory and for deriving design knowledge to create advanced, cognition- and affect-sensitive CT features

The Impact of Anthropomorphic and Functional Chatbot Design Features in Enterprise Collaboration Systems on User Acceptance

Information technology is rapidly changing the way how people collaborate in enterprises. Chatbots integrated into enterprise collaboration systems can strengthen collaboration culture and help reduce work overload. In light of a growing usage of chatbots in enterprise collaboration systems, we examine the influence of anthropomorphic and functional chatbot design features on user acceptance. We conducted a survey with professionals familiar with interacting with chatbots in a work environment. The results show a significant effect of anthropomorphic design features on perceived usefulness, with a strength four times the size of the effect of functional chatbot features. We suggest that researchers and practitioners alike dedicate priorities to anthropomorphic design features with the same magnitude as common for functional design features in chatbot design and research

Emotion-Adaptive Learning Systems for Transferrable Skill Learning

In traditional school education, acquiring factual knowledge is still the major focus. The advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and the digitalization of socio-economical processes, however, have fundamentally changed the way humans work and live. Today, humans have the ability to access facts fast through smartphones, computers, and the internet. They can access this knowledge flexibly whenever they want. Thus, obtaining factual knowledge by heart has become less essential. In a fast-paced world, individuals must quickly adapt to new environments. Transferrable skills have become essential as they support humans to adapt to dynamic environments. They are seen as a key catalyst for helping the workforce adapt (ILO, 2021)

CrowdSurfer: Seamlessly Integrating Crowd-Feedback Tasks nto Everyday Internet Surfing

Crowd feedback overcomes scalability issues of feedback collection on interactive website designs. However, collecting feedback on crowdsourcing platforms decouples the feedback provider from the context of use. This creates more effort for crowdworkers to immerse into such context in crowdsourcing tasks. In this paper, we present CrowdSurfer, a browser extension that seamlessly integrates design feedback collection in crowdworkers’ everyday internet surfing. This enables the scalable collection of in situ feedback and, in parallel, allows crowdworkers to flexibly integrate their work into their daily activities. In a field study, we compare the CrowdSurfer against traditional feedback collection. Our qualitative and quantitative results reveal that, while in situ feedback with the CrowdSurfer is not necessarily better, crowdworkers appreciate the effortless, enjoyable, and innovative method to conduct feedback tasks. We contribute with our findings on in situ feedback collection and provide recommendations for the integration of crowdworking tasks in everyday internet surfing

Scalable Design Evaluation for Everyone! Designing Configuration Systems for Crowd-Feedback Request Generation

Design evaluation is an important step during software development to ensure users’ requirements are met. Crowd feedback represents an effective approach to tackling scalability issues of traditional design evaluation methods. Crowd-feedback systems are usually developed for a fixed use case and designers lack knowledge on how to build individual crowd-feedback systems by themselves. Consequently, they are rarely applied in practice. To address this challenge, we propose the design of a configuration system to support designers in creating individual crowd-feedback requests. By conducting expert interviews (N=14) and an exploratory literature review, we derive four design rationales for such configuration systems and propose a prototypical configuration system instantiation. We evaluate this instantiation in exploratory focus groups (N=10). The results show that feedback requesters appreciate guidance. However, there seems to be a trade-off between complexity and flexibility. With our research, we contribute with a generalizable concept to support feedback requesters to create individualized crowd-feedback requests to support scalable design evaluation for everyone

On Implementing Ethical Principles in Design Science Research

Technological innovations raise axiological questions such as what is right or wrong, good and bad, and so on (i.e., ethical considerations). These considerations have particular importance in design science research (DSR) projects since the developed artifacts often actively intervene into human affairs and, thus, cannot be free from value. To account for this fact, Myers and Venable (2014) proposed six ethical principles for DSR in order to support researchers to conduct ethical DSR. However, ethical principles per se—and the ethical DSR principles that Myers and Venable propose— have an abstract nature so that they can apply to a broad range of contexts. As a consequence, they do not necessarily apply to specific research projects, which means researchers need to contextualize them for each specific DSR project. Because doing so involves much challenge, we explore how contemporary DSR publications have dealt with this contextualization task and how they implemented the six ethical principles for DSR. Our results reveal that DSR publications have not discussed ethical principles in sufficient depth. To further promote ethical considerations in DSR, we argue that both DSR researchers and reviewers should be supported in implementing ethical principles. Therefore, we outline two pathways toward ethical DSR. First, we propose that researchers need to articulate the next generation of ethical principles for DSR using prescriptive knowledge structures from DSR. Second, we propose extending established DSR conceptualizations with an ethical dimension and specifically introduce the concept of ethical DSR process models. With this work, we contribute to the IS literature by reviewing ethical principles and their implementation in DSR, identifying potential challenges hindering efforts to implement ethics in DSR, and providing two pathways towards ethical DSR

Live-Cell dSTORM of Cellular DNA Based on Direct DNA Labeling

We have implemented the super-resolution method of direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) to image nuclear and mitochondrial DNA in living cells. We also demonstrate time-lapse imaging, all using a dye that associates directly with cellular DNA: the commercially available dye Picogree