In the first of this series of blogs, I discussed the history and future of videoconferencing cameras, in the second I discussed the hierarchy of rooms/spaces/environments for visual collaboration. This – part three – is about how to use the darned things.
From the earliest days of technology in enterprise conference rooms the user interface (UI) has been a contentious, problematic and difficult part of users’ satisfaction with that technology. All UIs have to achieve a balance between simplicity and power. The more that they can do, the harder they are to operate. So because videoconferencing has traditionally been hard, the UI has needed to do a lot to meet the needs.