Meeting Bridges: Designing Information Artifacts that Bridge from Synchronous Meetings to Asynchronous Collaboration

TL;DR

Addressing remote meeting fatigue and collaboration overload, the paper investigates how to bridge synchronous meetings into asynchronous collaboration via the concept of meeting bridges. It employs a mixed-methods approach including 13 interviews, a survey of 198 information workers, and five co-design groups (16 participants) to identify five post-meeting uses and five supporting design principles. The findings show that current notes and recordings are often insufficient for effective post-meeting work, motivating a design space for multimodal, structured, customizable, contextual, and evolvable artifacts. The work provides empirical insights, concrete design principles, and mockups to guide future systems aimed at reducing meeting and collaboration overload in remote work environments.

Abstract

A recent surge in remote meetings has led to complaints of ``Zoom fatigue'' and ``collaboration overload,'' negatively impacting worker productivity and well-being. One way to alleviate the burden of meetings is to de-emphasize their synchronous participation by shifting work to and enabling sensemaking during post-meeting asynchronous activities. Towards this goal, we propose the design concept of meeting bridges, or information artifacts that can encapsulate meeting information towards bridging to and facilitating post-meeting activities. Through 13 interviews and a survey of 198 information workers, we learn how people use online meeting information after meetings are over, finding five main uses: as an archive, as task reminders, to onboard or support inclusion, for group sensemaking, and as a launching point for follow-on collaboration. However, we also find that current common meeting artifacts, such as notes and recordings, present challenges in serving as meeting bridges. After conducting co-design sessions with 16 participants, we distill key principles for the design of meeting bridges to optimally support asynchronous collaboration goals. Overall, our findings point to the opportunity of designing information artifacts that not only support users to access but also continue to transform and engage in meeting information post-meeting.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Based on insights from an interview and a survey study on people's current practices and challenges in using meeting information after meetings end, we propose the design concept of meeting bridges. Through co-design sessions, we distilled five key design dimensions and created example mockups of meeting bridges to illustrate the opportunity of designing information artifacts that not only support users to access but also continue to transform and engage in meeting information post-meeting.
• Figure 2: (a) The survey result shows that people use a variety of artifacts to keep track of information from meetings. Paper and digital notes are used most widely among participants. (b) Participants reported likely to revisit notes, regardless of whether they attended the meeting or not, but only likely to revisit the recording when they missed the meeting.
• Figure 3: When revisiting recordings, participants reported a more expansive list of goals compared to their goals when revisiting notes.
• Figure 4: Co-design session setup. Parts of the images are blurred for anonymity. Participants are asked to sketch ideas for meeting bridges from the real or realistic meeting that they had. We provided a variety of existing information artifacts from the meeting (e.g., notes, recordings, transcripts, etc.) as materials for participants.
• Figure 5: Design Principle #1: Incorporation of multiple data types and rich media presentations. We show two design examples: link notes with video clips and resources (top) and link speaker information and note snippets to video chapters (bottom). For each example, we show original sketches collected in co-design sessions, as well as a synthesized mockup based on the sketches.