Motivation

The use of technology for video meetings is ubiquitous in our daily lives, both in the context of work and leisure. Contemporary video meeting systems such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams offer a variety of different design features and guide the interaction between meeting participants.

These features vary in their functionality and appearance. Basic design features are the arrangement of the video participant videos or the chat window. More advanced examples of such design features are the ability to automatically blur the background of the video or the highlighting of the speaking person with a colored frame. Ideally, these features should be offered and leveraged by meeting participants in a way to improve meeting participants’ performance and well-being. However, current video meeting systems seem to just offer more and more features without understanding their impact on meeting participants. Furthermore, they not guide meeting participants on which design features should be used in order to achieve intended meeting outcomes.  

One way to mitigate these problems would be to understand the impact of each feature on meeting outcomes on a more fine-granular level and provide features adaptively under consideration of meeting participants characteristics and states. However, adaptive video meeting systems are still rare and are not well researched. To encounter this, the research project KD2School (http://kd2school.info/) aims to design adaptive systems for economic decision-making. As a part of the project, also adaptive video meeting systems shall be researched. As a first step towards understanding and designing adaptive video meeting systems, a structured conceptualization of design features of existing video meeting systems is required.

The goal of this thesis is to build a systematic classification of existing design features of currently available video meeting systems described in research and practice. The identification should either be done via design exploration techniques (e.g., by Think Aloud Session, or Attribute Listing, see servicedesignkit.org for inspiration) or by a systematic literature analysis. To classify the identified design features, existing frameworks shall be applied and validated (e.g., by Card Sorting).  

Goal of the thesis

• Research and identify existing design features of video meeting systems
• Develop and evaluate a comprehensive classification of design features of video meeting systems building on an existing framework

Skills required

• Strong time management and communication skills
• Interest in video meeting systems and feature analysis
• Strong analytical and English skills

Contact

If you are interested in this topic and want to apply for this thesis, please contact Julia Seitz with your CV and current transcript of records. Feel free to reach out beforehand if you have any questions.