Introduction:
The goal of our application is to increase situational awareness between two conversation partners separated by distance. We hope to accomplish this goal by implementing a video chat interface with supplementary information about each user's setting (i.e. local weather, news, time, etc.). We were motivated to pursue this concept because we feel that traditional video chat isolates the user from her setting, making the genuine connection of a face-to-face interaction impossible to replicate. We believe that this additional context will lead to more natural conversations through video chat, thus encouraging users to communicate across distances more openly.
Method:
After consulting with our mentor, we have designed the following plan for user testing our application:
Task:
We want to explore how contextual video chat makes conversation more natural. The task we will give users is to open conversation with small talk before moving on to discuss a predetermined topic. These topics will be brief and their nature will vary between professional and social. We will measure the difference in length and quality of small talk before users move on to their assigned topic.
Users:
2 control users that will video chat with one of our group members and will be given no additional contextual information.
4 users that will chat with one of our group members in a simulated distant location and will be given contextual information.
2 users chatting with each other across an actual distance. This will most accurately capture the ultimate use case.
Obviously using more distant participants would be ideal, and we will try to find more if time permits.
Design:
The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of supplementary contextual information on participants’ ability to speak naturally. After each user test we will follow up with a semi-structured interview to determine our application’s effectiveness in aiding natural conversation. Our rationale for this study design is that we feel video chat is most often reserved for discussing a specific topic and small talk is often omitted. We hypothesize that the presence of contextual information will encourage natural conversation in our video chat application.
Results:
We found that on average the small talk between users lasted longer in the context based app over the control conversation.
Some key quotes from our semi-structured interviews were:
No context:
“Making small talk is always a little awkward. You just kind of get through it to be polite.”
With context:
“The added context was cool to see. I thought I wouldn’t use it, but when I saw that it was 89 degrees at Stanford, I actually brought it up.”
“It was pretty unclear where these articles were coming from. Are they my local news? I ended up just ignoring it.”
Discussion:
Observations:
Testing Flaws:
Implications:
The goal of our application is to increase situational awareness between two conversation partners separated by distance. We hope to accomplish this goal by implementing a video chat interface with supplementary information about each user's setting (i.e. local weather, news, time, etc.). We were motivated to pursue this concept because we feel that traditional video chat isolates the user from her setting, making the genuine connection of a face-to-face interaction impossible to replicate. We believe that this additional context will lead to more natural conversations through video chat, thus encouraging users to communicate across distances more openly.
Method:
After consulting with our mentor, we have designed the following plan for user testing our application:
Task:
We want to explore how contextual video chat makes conversation more natural. The task we will give users is to open conversation with small talk before moving on to discuss a predetermined topic. These topics will be brief and their nature will vary between professional and social. We will measure the difference in length and quality of small talk before users move on to their assigned topic.
Users:
2 control users that will video chat with one of our group members and will be given no additional contextual information.
4 users that will chat with one of our group members in a simulated distant location and will be given contextual information.
2 users chatting with each other across an actual distance. This will most accurately capture the ultimate use case.
Obviously using more distant participants would be ideal, and we will try to find more if time permits.
Design:
The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of supplementary contextual information on participants’ ability to speak naturally. After each user test we will follow up with a semi-structured interview to determine our application’s effectiveness in aiding natural conversation. Our rationale for this study design is that we feel video chat is most often reserved for discussing a specific topic and small talk is often omitted. We hypothesize that the presence of contextual information will encourage natural conversation in our video chat application.
Results:
We found that on average the small talk between users lasted longer in the context based app over the control conversation.
Some key quotes from our semi-structured interviews were:
No context:
“Making small talk is always a little awkward. You just kind of get through it to be polite.”
With context:
“The added context was cool to see. I thought I wouldn’t use it, but when I saw that it was 89 degrees at Stanford, I actually brought it up.”
“It was pretty unclear where these articles were coming from. Are they my local news? I ended up just ignoring it.”
Discussion:
Observations:
- Small talk for the contextual video chat was slightly longer
- Some of the users ignored the context while chatting
- Weather was the most addressed topic
- Some users were unclear who context belonged to
Testing Flaws:
- More comparison between normal and context video chat
- Difficult to quantify how context helps conversation in short test
- Needed more remote participants
Implications:
- Sports news is not locally specific
- might be better to show same content to both users
- Too many headlines
- hard to read and understand what the articles are - might be better to do fewer articles with more info for each
- Hard to read and talk
- giving the users a preview of the context before the video chat starts might help
- People don’t want to say they need help
- conversation starters can be a little condescending - framing or marketing it differently could help disguise the idea