Fostering a culture of dialogue and direct exchange can be scary! We’ve all seen comment sections that are not the nicest to read and do not encourage healthy dialogue (looking at you, Youtube comment section 👀).
We encourage and celebrate open discussions with all participants being able to unmute and actively join the conversation. We also understand that rooms more prone to trolling (think controversial conversation topics) or rooms with a massive audience benefit from a more structured approach to speaker selection.
Today we introduce the speaker queue as part of our in-room conversation product.
To help manage the audience, we established two new roles for the participants. Speaker and Listener.
In our new default room, everyone joins the room being a Listener, which means that they can only listen and can’t unmute themself. This is how moderators can make sure that nobody can meddle in the conversation unwantedly. It also gives peace of mind to participants that just want to listen in without the worry of accidentally unmuting.
If listeners want to speak up and add to the conversation, they can simply raise their virtual hand ✋ Moderators will be notified and can then add listeners as speakers.
When a listener raises their hand, a little *plop* sound and a green badge indicate to speakers someone wants to speak.
Moderators can see all speakers and people that would like to become speakers. We think the best part is, that the order of the speakers is the order they’ve raised their hands! No more guessing who wants to speak first 🤩
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With this new audience management, we enable our customers to have stress-free conversation experiences, without taking the directness out of the experience or making it feel too hierarchical.
After the first rounds of testing, we learned that even casual conversations groups started embracing the speaker queue. That’s why we decided to make it the default when creating and embedding new rooms. Of course, when creating a room, people can still opt for a completely open conversation experience. Where everyone can unmute themselves and add to the conversation.
If you’re curious and want to try out how the speaker queue feels in action, don’t hesitate and create a room here.
