…The More They Stay the Same.
This is as true with communications as it is with societal ills.
There was a study from 18 years ago (and here) to see how to make video conferencing (which we’ve gone well beyond now into app sharing and collaborative tools) more palatable to users. Note, this study was done for Sun Microsystems! This was not a small study from people of no consequence.
Something that I was very intrigued by was that the main frustrations are still the main frustrations. Of particular note: Poor video quality was amongst the least annoying problems!
Let me repeat: Poor video quality was amongst the least annoying problems!!!
Video quality, 18 years ago, was mentioned as a problem only 28% of the time. Time delay jumped up over 50% (52%!). Poor overhead projection ability, now a defunct problem with pixel-to-pixel application sharing, scored a 53% , while poor audio—this is important!—was a problem with 55% of the respondents being annoyed about it. The last of these big players was scheduling a room to hold the conference in. At 72%, this is thankfully something that only the room-based telepresence-specific players have to worry about! No worries with ad-hoc, from-your-desk software like VSee! (What a shameless, shameless plug.)
Although everyone wants the video to look as pristine as possible—we do too!—it’s not the most important part of communication to get a message across. We find video, even if it lags and stutters, does a great job conveying emotion and the subtleties of non-verbal communication. So a poorer quality of video is not absolutely necessary except to look cool…okay, fine, that’s not entirely true. It also makes you feel more immersed and comfortable in the environment you’re communicating in, but people find they can adjust to a fuzzy picture.
Unlike video quality, which you can adjust to, time delay is a much greater distraction. We are programmed from birth (and physics) to see a mouth open before we hear a voice. We are likewise programmed to hear responses fairly close to the time a statement is made, otherwise we cannot make sense of a conversation when the topic has moved on and then you hear a response that was spoken 20 seconds ago. These issues can destroy the illusion of real-time communication faster than nearly anything else I’ve experienced, and it makes sense that delay nearly doubles the annoyance level that poor video quality has.
I won’t rant on the inability of people in the early 90s to see overhead projections while videoconferencing. Pixel-to-pixel application sharing has pretty well taken care of that problem!
The big one to me is audio quality. Why make a call if you can’t communicate verbally? We like to communicate verbally. If you take away our ability to speak to each other and use nuance of tone, inflection, immediate response and dialogue, etc., then there is no need to conference, whether by phone or video. Just write an email. In our own experiences here, people are often calling in with virtually no network bandwidth, or on a terrible computer with a sub-sub par camera. We just ask those people to mute their cameras and use the software as a teleconference with app sharing! Why? Because that verbal communication is the basis of why a call was made rather than an email.
Another way to put it: You don’t pop by a coworker’s cubicle just to hand them a slip of paper. You go to their cubicle because you want to talk to them in person.
I can’t speak for Skype, Oovoo, Nefsis, Tandberg/Cisco and the others, but I assume we all follow the “audio is king” model that says, “If conditions are not optimal, degrade video and preserve audio.” Your initial reaction may be to balk at that statement, but when you’ve got a deliverable deadline the next morning and you’re conferencing from a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, you’ll be grateful that people did some studies on this and made sure you got your collaboration done!
I plan at some point to touch upon other fascinating things from this study, but for now, I recommend anyone who’s interested in the ins and outs of how we (meaning everyone) view videoconferencing (or how we did two decades ago) check it out.
