Interaction Mirrors for Face-to-Face Meetings

To be successful, a group requires an appropriate quality of coordination among its members. Even with the advent of remote communication, face-to-face meetings remain the context that offers the best interaction support to an effective collaboration. However, face-to-face meetings seem to suffer from recurring shortcomings which are yet to be alleviated. One of them is the omniscience and persistence of undetected gaps between the actual and the desired (or intended) state of the meeting. The evolution of technology has spawned the creation and availability of large sets of data, giving birth to what we call today analytics, the science of discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in this data. This thesis aims to explore the potential of technology to process meeting-related data and help reveal these gaps to the participants. We also conduct an analysis of the actions that the participants perform, as an effect of becoming aware of such gaps, and we reflect on their possible role in increasing the effectiveness of the meeting. Our technologies collect interaction data in real-time during face-to-face meetings, perform analytics to transform this raw data into explicit representations, and then use visualizations to communicate knowledge about the interaction back to the participants. This thesis expands the concept of Group Mirrors, to define the concept of Interaction Mirrors, which are tools that perform this instant transformation of meeting data into explicit repre- sentations, and return this knowledge back to the group during the meeting. We present the implementation of three types of Interaction Mirrors that tackle aspects of interaction related to Participation, Time management, and Mutual Knowledge. They vary with respect to data collection, being either implicit (continuous) or explicit (discrete), and to their presentation to the group (continuous or discrete). We perform a total of 7 experiments, ranging from basic usability observations, to year-long, longitudinal studies. Conducted in real-world situations, most of these studies are set up in the field, in various organizations, corporations and institutions. We show that each type of interaction mirror has an influence on the group, and discuss the capacity of this influence to improve the outcomes of the collaboration.