The promise and peril of parallel chat in video meetings for work. Chat is a common
and highly-used feature during online meetings, but how people use chat is extremely understudied.
We present data from a poll and diary study of over 800 Microsoft employees. Most respondents in our poll
reported an increase in parallel chat use after shift to remote work, by themselves
and by others. We identified seven distinct types of chat message including
Questions for speaker or other attendee(s) Links to resources, documents, webpages
Unrelated conversation held in same chat Voicing agreement, sending messages of praise
Adding information to what is being said or starting new conversation about related topic
Responses to previous messages Humour and casual conversation
Positive effects of parallel chat in video meetings for work include:
Inclusion and participation without interrupting the flow of the primary (video) conversation
Coordination of action and collaboration, sharing resources and enabling post-meeting
discussion instead of separate follow-up tasks Casual conversation and humour can give meetings
a greater sense of social support and connection Negative aspects of using parallel chat in
video meetings for work include: Distraction for meeting participants who wish
to focus on the meeting topic and difficulty with division of attention
Differing expectations on informality, side conversations, and how chat should be used
Limitations of platform’s interface, attentional effort, and A/V issues can lead to information
asymmetries Since people use parallel chat in such different
ways, we recommend sharing guidelines for intentionally balancing utility and distraction:
Establish expectations about chat usage before meeting starts
Consider chat-related accessibility challenges (e.g., processing parallel multi-modal sources,
understanding text sentiment, providing text descriptions of images) and ensure accessibility
requests are met Encourage chat that engages with different
aspects of meeting’s topic or makes meeting more inclusive; discourage overly off-topic,
exclusionary, inaccessible chat Monitor chat for questions and relay them
to current speaker Synthesize chat highlights and incorporate
into meeting recaps to share with attendees
Opportunities for tools include Differentiate and annotate the content of
chat for different kinds of chat messages (e.g., questions, clarifications, comments,
kudos, on- and off-topic talk) Integrate chat with A/V, for example:
Indicators for presenters about busy/quiet chat
Highlighting messages with terms that match discussion
Aggregate kudos for end of presentation Show/hide questions automatically
Integrate images, websites shared in chat with main A/V
Connect timestamped textual material (chat, transcript, and meeting notes) into bundle
Special moderator view to effectively manage parallel chat