[111attendees] Re: So, what are jabber scribes actually doing, these days?

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2021, at 05:21, Jay Daley wrote:
> No we have absolutely not pushed Meetecho into being "just a contractor", they are a valued partner and we work very well together.  If you have any doubts about that then ask them directly.  
> 
> It is disappointing that you have escalated a personal concern that you have with our services into such a strong criticism when that is entirely unsupported by any evidence.  

Jay, I agree with your sentiment here - this attitude to Meetecho is counterproductive.  They've done great work for the last couple of IETFs and the experience is improving each time.  I have particularly appreciated the embedded slide management, and I'm sure that will be even better next time too.

Regarding the specific interface issues that remain, I do think there's a question of "where do we propose improvements in a way that will be noticed"?  I've seen the suggestion made very many times that the "speaker" area (where the video shows) should have additional lines for each person sending anything, rather than that information being at the top of the participant list.  This is much more like the experience with other chat systems, for example Zoom shows either a photo or a blank item for somebody who isn't currently sending video, but they're otherwise treated "the same" as a person sending video in terms of real-estate and where to look for their presence by default.

Right now with meetecho, my eyes are normally at the video are when people are speaking, but if a non-video person is speaking I need to look across to the other side of the screen to see the audio indication.

And as was also suggested in this thread, you can't scroll the participant list to find someone to chat to, because they jump to the top when they are sending, then back to alphabetical position.  This is also a usability pain.  Separating "the list of participants" (which wouldn't move about) and "the list of people sending something" with the video and audio indications being together in one place would be a significant improvement.  And as an additional benefit, when you're looking at the chat window, you would still be able to see all the details of who is sending (including yourself - if you're sending then the indicator of your own audio should be the same as the indicator of everyone else's audio, rather than being in yet a third location up under your own name).

So those two names would appear in the right hand side, and also still have their name in the participant list, and the video feeds would each have a "here's what's being sent".  Chairs would always have a presence on the right, with whatever they were currently sending - and the "participants" tab would only have the list of participants, and not be a place you needed to go to see activity, so you could mostly keep the chat tab open.

Bron.


--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [e-mail]