Title
Online Mingling: Supporting Ad Hoc, Private Conversations at Virtual Conferences
Abstract
ABSTRACT Even though today’s videoconferencing systems are often very useful, these systems do not provide support for one of the most important aspects of in-person meetings: the ad hoc, private conversations that happen before, after, and during the breaks of scheduled events–the proverbial hallway conversations. Here we describe our design of a simple system, called Minglr, which supports this kind of interaction by facilitating the matching of conversational partners. We describe two studies of this system’s use at two virtual conferences with over 450 total participants. Our results provide evidence for the usefulness of this capability, showing that, for example, 81% of people who used the system successfully thought that future virtual conferences should include a tool with similar functionality. We believe that similar functionality is likely to be widely implemented in many videoconferencing systems and to increase the feasibility and desirability of many kinds of remote work and socializing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3411764.3445776
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jaeyoon Song101.01
Christoph Riedl232119.82
Thomas W. Malone346831862.38