Why to auto-answer video calls
blog.quicklychat.com
blog.quicklychat.com
Face to face works so well because there are so many unconscious cues we can pick up on. There's a whole other channel of nonverbal, subconscious communication. That isn't really picked up over videoconferencing, so all you'll get are unwanted work interruptions at best, and some really embarrassing situations at worst.
It's polite to knock on a colleague's office door; I don't see ringing before a call as being different. If you need to work face to face, work face to face.
There are a lot of nonverbal cues that you pick up in real life, and you pick up more of these with video than just with text or audio.
There are times when it's polite to knock, like if the office door is closed. If the door is open, or you're working in an open office, coworkers can generally just come and say hi. Working face to face is often best, but it's not possible for some people, and we're trying to enable some part of the working face to face experience for those people.
I know that it's hard to buy that auto-answering will help you be more efficient when working together, but together with automatic status detection, it works well for a lot of our early users. If you're ever in the situation where you want to work face to face with someone, but can't, then give us a try, and if it doesn't work for you, let us know why, and we'll try to build something that does.
This is so contrived, it hurts...
And then, on your homepage:
This is a big part of the reason teams are much less productive when they're spread apart.
Nonsense. I've worked with many distributed teams and there simply is no correlation between productivity and location.
I don't think you're doing yourselves a favor by pushing the age old "it's just like being there"-fairytale. You can insult the intelligence of your audience like that when you're a Vodafone or a Samsung, but not when you're trying to sell a product (and likely to a largely technical audience).
The question that you have to answer on your homepage is: Why not Skype?
Do that in bold, front and center. Don't bore me with marketing lorem ipsum...
- Many people will get nervous about the idea that someone can instantly watch them without warning, and simply refuse to buy in.
- Coworkers will start playing pranks at who they can spy on without them noticing, catching someone at an embarrassing moment, or snapping photos of the dumb look on someone's face when they're in deep focus.
- At most companies, there isn't just one person who needs to get ahold of you. If I walk to your desk and there's someone there already, I come back later. Auto-video lets you see one person only, rather than the whole environment.
- It's awkward to show your face, see they're busy and disappear, especially multiple times, and eventually you'll stop trying and just send an email. At most organizations, the good times to just barge in are rare, and the miss-to-hit ratio will get quickly discouraging.
All that said, I applaud the goal, and I might try using this anyway. I've worked with people remotely often and have wondered about how to establish the correct social conventions for chat/audio/video to mitigate some of the loss of subtle information cues you take for granted in an office environment. Keep experimenting, there is promise to the core idea.
This is the reason why if you really need your work to be done, you got to turn off your phone, cancel your meetings, stop your emails from popping-up, etc.
The effects of interruptions on productivity is now well-known. They kill it.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201204/why... http://workingmoms.about.com/od/executiveopportunities/a/5-W...
Edit: By all means put up screenshots so one can see what this app looks like.
On the contrary, difficult problems (difficult not in integration, but in algorithm) require total concentration and absense of distractions. Therefore you better not be in the office, and (more heresy) be totally disconnected.
Turning off the interenet is a good thing sometimes.
Called and got massive non-stop feedback. It's unfortunate that the complete lack of echo cancellation (skype, gtalk, etc work great for us using identical setup) makes this dead on arrival.
I understand the problem that this approach is trying to address and whilst it is in some way a problem there are better ways. I spent less than a minute thinking of a better solution (IMHO) and that is:
You have a webcam on your desk (or remote hot vid mini desk spots) and you are permanatly logged into that. This allows the remote worker to be apart of the office and also for people to walk up and speak to them, allowing the remote worker to be seen as well as see who is approaching, instead of wam bam in your face. This also affords people to see when they are busy or not. To me this approach is better. But this and also assumes the remote worker has the bandwith to accomodate this and there not on some 3g/28.8 connection due to there location and for alot that is why they are remote working anyhow. Rememebr remote working also covers workers in different locations. I and many others I can garantee have worked in companies with more than one office in more than one location and none of them have an issue and tend to still use bridged conference calls or phone calls. Video has it's uses but it also has its distractions and overheads that can outway the task at hand.