Enhancing Notification Awareness for Online Presenters via a Wrist-Worn Device

Abstract

The practice of giving presentations online has exploded during the Covid pandemic. However, in these settings, presenters often find themselves overlooking questions and feedback, e.g. via chat, from the audience, because the presenter's screen is dominated by their slides, with other channels becoming less noticeable. This causes frustration among presenters and their audience alike. We investigate the impact of additional visual, auditory, and haptic cues for presenters in online scenarios, using a wrist-worn prototype. For this, we conducted a study where participants gave presentations via the videoconferencing tool Zoom on specific topics while trying to notice and correctly identify incoming notifications. Our findings indicate that supplementary notifications can be helpful in online presentations without inappropriately disturbing the presenter.

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