Why the MUTE button is important at the US presidential debate and your daily web conferencing needs ?
October 21, 2020
This is my second article about web conferencing system.
Ok. we know the first presidential debate was a train wreck. And many critics had said that the moderator Mr. Chris Wallace should have muted Donald Trump’s microphone. Question is does Mr. Wallace even have access to a mute button at all. The production team for sure had control access to the entire A/V systems. The debate commission has now imposed the need to have the microphone muted for the next presidential debate. See this news here with this link. While we are not here to discuss political stance or whether the president should have been muted in the last presidential debate, let’s discuss the importance the of the MUTE button here for your daily web conferencing needs.
In my last story about Polycom (now Poly after the merger with Plantronics) had been pioneering in the domain of video conferencing with other system providers like Cisco’s Telepresence, Huawei, etc. For these systems, there is a common need to interact with the system through simple reliable UX/UI. This is why these systems all come with a remote controller and one of the main feature is the MUTE button (See below)
Because of the popularity of the distributed use and multi-modal access to web conferencing systems thanks to Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, Whereby, Bluejeans, Deltapath, and many more, people are introduced to web conferencing or video calls using PCs, notebook computers, tablet PCs and smartphones. The UX/UI had been conveniently converted to the use of keyboards, mouse and touch screen interfaces. However, the mute button and camera ON/OFF button are usually accessible on the screen by pressing the icons and different conferencing systems position them in different places. (E.g. Zoom places them near bottom left corner, Webex places them in the middle.
So the issue is when you need to find the mouse, the cursor and finally hit the mute icon, or need to turn on or turn off the camera, it is always not as handy as you thought and sometimes it takes as much as 3 seconds to complete this simple task. All these popular web conferencing systems have keyboard shortcuts albeit they are not always easy to remember. Microsoft Teams is the worst in this case, you need three fingers (yep, try it for yourself) So when armed with some technical knowhow, some PC enthusiasts and makers had even hack their way to build their own physical mute button with a USB cord to mimic the pressing of the mute icon (see below) – mimicking a keyboard shortcut.
The Mute and Camera on/off icons or button are now probably two of best features you can now have to conduct web conferencing system (and that’s if you can have one).
So back to the presidential debate, the Mute button will become very important as we know how crazy the last debate was. As for your daily web conferencing, it is as important as using copy and paste (CTRL C and CTRL V) in your keyboard if you can remember the use of keyboard shortcuts. We have prepared in our other blogpost some keyboard shortcut cheat sheets. We first describe the same problem with our interns’ writting a blog in Medium about keyboard shortcuts for different web conferencing systems. Please click link to see this article.
To read my series of articles on Web conferencing productivity, please see below
To read more about our Remodo VC – world’s universal web conferencing remote controller as reported by China Gadget Review. So if you know what the pain point in operating multiple web conferencing system as a business executive or even as a student / teacher involved in remote learning. It will be very useful to know about this remote controller.
