Virtual conference design: features and obstacles

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced a change in the way people work, and the location that they work from. The impact has caused significant disruption to education, the work environment and how social interactions take place. Online user habits have also changed due to lockdown restrictions and virtual conferencing software has become a vital cog in team communication. In result, a spate in software solutions have emerged in order to support the challenges of remote learning and working. The conferencing software landscape is now a core communication solution for company-wide interaction, team discussions, screen sharing and face-to-face contact. Yet the number of existing platforms is diverse. In this article, a systematic literature review investigation on virtual conferencing is presented. As output from the analysis, 67 key features and 74 obstacles users experience when interacting with virtual conferencing technologies are identified from 60 related open-source journal articles from 5 digital library repositories.