Here’s what’s on my wish list for the work-from-home era
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and welcome to Plain English lesson number 361. JR is the producer and he has uploaded the full and complete lesson to PlainEnglish.com/361.
Coming up today: We’re now in month 13 of our work from home arrangement, and that has been more than enough time to tell what technology works for this new era, and what technology doesn’t. So today’s lesson is my wish list: here are all the things I want companies to produce to make my work at home life easier.
Now a few guidelines: first, everything on this list is technically possible today. I’m not asking for anything that’s impossible. Second, some of this stuff does exist in some form, but it’s not really mainstream in video calling yet. So I made my list—you can think about what your list would be as you listen. The expression is “filter out.” And during the expression section, I’ll tell you about a funny job I had as a teenager. JR has a song of the week, too. So let’s get going!
A tech wish list for the work at home era
More than a year into the great worldwide work from home experiment, we all have our essential gear and strategies. For me, I can’t live without my second monitor, my wireless mouse and keyboard, and my speakerphone. Your essential gear might be different. But today’s lesson is about my wish list of things are not yet on the market. However, they should be possible. So this is my call to the product designers and developers of work-from-home tools.
The first thing on the list is a camera built into a screen. Video calls can be awkward without the sensation that two people are looking at each other. But the laptop designs put the camera on top of the screen—or, in an unfortunate decision by Dell a few years ago, below the screen and angled up. That means that participants rarely look directly into the camera—they’re always looking slightly below it. If a camera is behind the screen, then we’d be able to look directly into the camera and have something closer to real eye contact with our coworkers.
That brings me to the second thing on the list, and that is an auto-panning camera. To pan is to move the camera left and right, up and down. Most laptop cameras simply show what’s directly in front of them. That means that we, as laptop users, are centered in the frame only if we’re sitting directly facing the camera, not moving, for the entire duration of the meeting. That’s part of the reason why Zoom calls are so tiring: because the camera is fixed in one location, you don’t have the flexibility to move your body at all when on a video call.
But a camera that naturally pans left and right would allow you to move around a little in your workspace without being off center. Think about it: you can lean back in your chair, stand up, scoot your chair forward or back, turn your body in one direction, and the camera would follow you so that you’re always in the frame. This wouldn’t necessarily require a lot of moving parts: a wide-angle lens behind the screen could be adjusted by software to find you and center you in the image.
Let’s take it a step further. Video call software lets you pick the camera you want to use. But if you have two cameras, the software should automatically find you in the camera that shows your face the best. That would give you even more flexibility. On video calls, I use my laptop and an external monitor. But if I’m looking at the external monitor, I’m turning the side of my face to the camera and looking off to the side—not a great angle. If I had a second camera on my other monitor, the software should follow my face closer to where I’m looking.
Are you at your computer right now? If so, look down at your keyboard. What buttons do you see? I’m sure you see all the standard keys. But my keyboard has some custom media buttons: volume up, volume down, play, pause, fast forward, keys like that. My wireless keyboard even has a dedicated “eject” button: that tells you how old this keyboard is! But here’s what’s on my wish list for future keyboards: I want hot keys to mute and unmute, to turn on and off video, and to answer and leave a video call or meeting.
Yes, I know: there are keyboard shortcuts for these in both Microsoft Teams and Zoom. But it’s not the same. One of the difficulties in online meetings is not knowing when it’s your turn to talk. People taking just a second or two to unmute themselves with their mouse or keyboard interrupts the flow of a conversation. I think our keyboards need to help us find that mute-unmute button faster. If it saves half a second, it could really improve the quality of our conversations.
I was a little under the weather last week and I found myself sneezing on video calls. I managed to hit that video-off button with my mouse a few times, but I missed it once, too. I’d love a hot key on my keyboard to quickly turn on and off video. It’s a small thing, but they could put it right where the eject button is now, since none of my computers has an external disk drive.
The next item on my wish list is a software innovation. One of the things that annoys me on video calls is the sound of other people typing, clicking a mouse, and using the mouse’s scroll wheel. But it’s also not ideal to constantly mute and unmute if you’re typing notes during a call. Here’s what we need: the meeting platforms should filter out the noise of keystrokes and mouse clicks so we don’t need to use the mute button.
This should be easy. With artificial intelligence and advancements in sound processing, Microsoft and Zoom should be able to train their software to identify the frequencies of these sounds and filter them out automatically or let a meeting organizer toggle the filters so the sound is best for their meetings.
Those are my big items. A few small ones. We need better cameras: we know that. Most of us don’t have ideal light in our houses, but that’s not our fault. Cell phone cameras are great in low light; it’s time for our laptop cameras to catch up. Likewise the microphone and speakers. I love my external speakerphone, but it shouldn’t be necessary. Our phones are much smaller and they have better sound and microphones than my laptop. I miss being able to draw with my hand: some meeting platforms have a “whiteboard” feature where you can “draw” with your mouse. But that’s no substitute for drawing with a pen. Somehow we need to get that ability to write and draw online. I just don’t know the right way.
A slippery slope
I was about to veer into my wish list for voice commands in Windows, but then I stopped myself. This lesson was my work at home tech wishlist, not my overall wishes and desires for computer usage in general. That would just make this lesson way, way too long!
I think the cameras are going to get better, but we’re going to have to wait a little for the product cycles to catch up. Most of us are working with laptops we bought, or our companies bought, pre-pandemic. Even new computers that were manufactured in the last few months were designed before the pandemic. I’d expect a new cycle of laptops with upgraded cameras to come later in 2021 or early 2022.
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