Supporting Peripheral Perception in Distributed Teams by Enforced Exposure to Chat Messages

Members of colocated teams benefit from being able to peripherally perceive ongoing conversations separating the useful information from the rest of the ambient sound. Instead of oral communication, distributed teams usually rely on chat. We developed an approach to supporting peripheral perception in distributed teams by enforced exposure to chat messages and implemented it as a chat client for Slack. The idea is to expose the team members to receive messages in order to emulate natural peripheral perception of oral communication that can be observed in colocated teams. We assessed how well enforced exposure to chat messages supports peripheral perception by following communication intensity, message relevance, and distraction in two experiment settings: content-based and periodical message displaying. The experiments were performed with four student teams in a week to two weeks’ time span. Seven team members had our chat client installed, while the rest of them (14) did not and used the unadapted chat clients they commonly use. The experiments were accompanied by a survey. Overall, enforced exposure to chat messages was perceived positively by the participants, especially in content-based message displaying. Communication intensity was clearly higher there, too. A strong correlation between the distraction caused by enforced exposure to chat messages and the communication intensity has been confirmed.