May SmartPhones Help to Maintain Audience Attention During

Presentations?

Matteo Ciman

, Yari Formaggio

, Ombretta Gaggi

and Marco Regazzo

Department of Mathematics, University of Padua, via Trieste, 63, Padova, Italy

Primo Round S.r.L.,via Durando 39, Milano, Italy

Keywords:

Interactive Presentations, Slideshows, Mobile Applications.

Abstract:

In this paper we describe a new tool for interactive presentations: the speaker shows a common slideshow on

the screen, and the users can see the same slide in their smartphone or tablet, independently from its model and

brand. The system can be used for both on-line and on-site presentations and encourages the user to perform

social activities, e. g., comment or like a slide. The author can also submit a questionnaire or a poll to the

audience and see in real-time the answers. Our tool has been used during 37 different events, followed by

3753 users. We recorded the actions of the users and, depending on the different kind of events, the average

of actions ranges from 1 to 8 per user per presentation. This data shows that our tool helps to increase users

engagement and to maintain user attention.

1 INTRODUCTION

One of the key problems for a speaker is to maintain

user attention. This problem is particularly relevant

for teachers, who has to transmit knowledge to their

students, or for speakers who presents a new product,

e. g., a medicine, to potential buyers. For this reason,

computer-based multimedia presentations has rapidly

replaced the use of chalkboards, overheads and hand-

outs, both in academic lectures and in presentations

in conference rooms. (Guadagno et al., 2011) even

demonstrate that the use of animated PowerPoint

presentations may affect the persuasive power of the

lesson/event on users’ decisions. Users perceive tech-

nological sophistication of a presentation as a heuris-

tic cue for high quality of the content, therefore it

inﬂates positive evaluations from users. Moreover,

(Snell, 1999) presented several reasons why interac-

tive lecturing and presentations are better than a static

presentation, e. g., active involvement can increase

student learning, attention and motivation and can

also provide feedback not only to the student but even

to the teacher, with a double beneﬁt.

Although the persuasive power of computer-based

multimedia presentations, they do not completely

solve the problem, since it often happens that many

users do not follow a presentation from its beginning

to the end, due to the limited attention threshold. The

diffusion of smartphones and tablets increases this

problem, since a bored audience often begins to read

email through smartphones or tablets or to perform

social activities like using Facebook or Twitter. But

can smartphones be used in a useful way?

In this paper we propose a system to involve users

during talks with the aims at turning smartphones

from a distracting tool, i. e., an enemy for the speaker,

into a useful tool for interaction for the user itself or

between the speaker and the user, thus encouraging

the user to keep attention on the presentation.

Our system allows to show PowerPoint

presen-

tations both through a projector and users devices.

The speaker follows the natural trend of the presen-

tation, can submit to the audience questionnaires or

polls and receive in real-time the answers, showing

the results on a dedicated slide. Moreover, it is pos-

sible to add comments on a slide that can be seen im-

mediately or in a second moment by the presenter.

Due to the widespread diffusion of PowerPoint

our system is based on an editor which translates a

presentation from its format to web pages, and allows

the insertion of questionnaires and polls. This clearly

aims at removing the learning curve, that is typically

associated with the adoption of a new technology, and

at targeting the highest number of presenters, even

those not skilled with HTML5, CSS and Javascript

languages. We also support other formats, e. g., ODF,

as discussed in Section 5.

Ciman M., Formaggio Y., Gaggi O. and Regazzo M..

May SmartPhones Help to Maintain Audience Attention During Presentations?.

DOI: 10.5220/0005441100550063

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2015), pages 55-63

ISBN: 978-989-758-106-9

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 RELATED WORK

PowerPoint

presentation conversion to web pages

and audience engagement has been investigated in lit-

erature from several points of view.

Joubert et al. (Joubert et al., 2011) converts pre-

sentations into compressed scalable vector graphics.

The conversion is performed to adapt presentations to

phones which are not able to read PowerPoint

for-

mat, but they do not provide any kind of interaction

more than stepping to the next slide.

Commercial tools like Adobe Captivate

, iSpring

and SlideGo

, that let the user convert from PPTX

format to HTML5 pages, besides being expensive,

produce not valid pages or introduce SWF elements

inside the pages. Another solution adopted by these

products is the simple conversion of a slide into an im-

age, which is placed inside an HTML page. All these

solutions do not allow the portability of the system

over all the mobile platforms. Our approach can be

used both with a desktop, a tablet or a mobile device.

Moreover it adapts the slides to user preferences, like

the dimension of the font.

Interaction between the speaker and the audience

is studied in (Triglianos and Pautasso, 2013). ASQ

allows to deliver interactive HTML5 presentations

which can contain questionnaires and polls, but the

teacher must create a web presentation which is a skill

not commonly available among teachers. The same

problem is also present in (Edge et al., 2013), where

the system, although it uses PowerPoint

application

and slide format as a basis, requires to the authors the

knowledge of a simple markup language.

In early 1993, Nickerson (Nickerson, 1993) reg-

istered a patent for a real-time wireless audience re-

sponse system to collect data from a plurality of par-

ticipants. This idea could be identiﬁed as the begin-

ning of the active participation in public talks, where

users are engaged and requested to provide their opin-

ion or data to particular questions.

To increase audience engagement, Maynes-

Aminzade et al. (Maynes-Aminzade et al., 2002)

developed a system that lets the audience control

on-screen activities using three different interactions:

leaning left or right on the seats, batting a beach ball

while its shadow is used as a pointing device and

pointing lasers at the screen. Although these inter-

actions cannot be used with professional audience, it

was clear that this sort of interaction could easily en-

gage people and increase their attention.

http://www.adobe.com/it/products/captivate.html

http://www.ispringsolutions.com/ispring-converter

http://www.slidego.com/

Barkhuus et al. (Barkhuus and Jørgensen, 2008)

investigated the usage of a voting system at rap com-

petitions. They showed how augmented interaction

can increase the sense of participation among the au-

dience. One investigation on a more serious context

was carried on by Jones et al. (Jones et al., 2006).

In this case, they investigated the usage of text mes-

saging as answer provider to polls submitted by the

speaker. The system receives the SMS with the an-

swer to the poll, records the data and let the speaker

show the overall answers provided. From their tests,

they showed how about 15% of the audience directly

took part at the polls, that could be higher if the stu-

dents had not to pay the costs of the SMS.

Differently from these approaches, our system

does not require any programming skills or to change

the tool to create presentations, but allows to use pre-

sentations already available for lessons or talks and to

integrate more interaction through a simple web page.

Moreover, it is portable over all the operating systems

and mobile devices that integrate a browser that sup-

ports HTML5. Our system does not translate each

slide into an image or a canvas, thus losing accessibil-

ity and portability of its content, but it translates the

slide in pure and valid HTML code, i. e., paragraphs,

tags <p>, for text and tags <img> only for pictures

and icons. In this way we preserve not only portabil-

ity and accessibility, but each slide adapts itself also

to user preferences as font size.

3 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Our system must support both on-site presentations,

i. e., audience and speaker meet together in a room,

and on-line events, i. e., the presentation is distributed

through the web, but there is not a speaker in the

users’ room. In the ﬁrst case, the speaker presents the

slides to the audience, following the natural trend of

the presentation. The main objective is to increase the

attention and the engagement (interaction) of the au-

dience with the speaker, and viceversa. Therefore, the

system supports the possibility for the user, i.e. a per-

son of the audience, to add a “like” or a comment on

a particular slide or, in some cases

, navigate through

the slides, without waiting for speaker presentation.

Moreover, the system supports the possibility, for the

speaker, to add a slide with a questionnaire or a poll.

The idea is to use these slides to interact with the au-

dience, and receive in real-time the answers. The user

initially sees only the question and the possible an-

swers, then the system collects in real-time all the

If the speaker enables this action during the conﬁgura-

tion phase.

WEBIST2015-11thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

Figure 1: Slide report with the result of a questionnaire.

answers, elaborates them and shows the results in a

dedicated slide (see Figure 1).

During on-site presentations, “like” and com-

ments are notiﬁed in real-time to the speaker, hence

giving him/her a feedback of the audience response

during the presentation. Moreover, if comments from

the audience are enabled, this immediate notiﬁcation

gives him/her the possibility to answer immediately

to possible questions.

Our system supports even on-line presentations,

where the presentation is recorded and spread through

the Web. In this case, presentation timing is managed

by the user, who can also submit “like”, comments

or questions to which the presenter can answer in a

second moment through email.

The system can be divided into a front-end and

a back-end component. The front-end component is

responsible to manage all the possible interactions be-

tween the speaker, the users and the system. First of

all, it provides the conﬁguration pages used to upload

and convert PowerPoint

presentations and to add in-

teractivity, i.e. questionnaire slides. Secondly, the

front-end component provides the proper interfaces

during the presentation. We identiﬁed three different

users’ roles that correspond to three different inter-

faces: the Viewer, the Projector and the Host. Fig-

ure 2 depicts all these components and their interac-

tions. We call Viewer the interface dedicated to the

audience and is responsible to manage users interac-

tions. Through this interface, an attendant is able to

interact during the presentation submitting comments,

answering to polls or sharing slides.

An example of the interface is provided in Figure

3. Comments and “like” are notiﬁed to the speaker

with two icons, a thumb up and a cartoon bubble with

the number of received “like” and comments.

The Host is the interface dedicated to the speaker.

During an on-site event, the speaker has the control of

the slideshow. He/she can move to the next/previous

slide and controls slides’ animations and interactive

slides. Moreover he/she can read, in real-time, au-

dience’s comments. The system allows to enable or

not the possibility to show comments to the speaker

during the initial conﬁguration phase. If enabled, the

Figure 2: System architecture.

Figure 3: Example of interface provided for the Viewer.

speaker, or the user, can click on the cartoon bubble

icon to display the comments. A visualization in the

Host interface is propagated to all the Viewer. A visu-

alization in a Viewer interface is interpreted as a tem-

porary de-synchronization from the presentation. The

speaker can decide to verbally answer to the comment

in the case of on-site presentation, otherwise he/she

can answer to the user through e-mail.

The Host is a reference point for viewers synchro-

nization and it rules the progress of the slideshow. As

soon as the speaker moves to a new slide, viewers who

are following the speaker, i. e., who are not moving

autonomously among the slides

, are also automat-

ically synchronized with the current slide. Even if

very different in terms of role inside the system, from

a graphic point of view, the Host interface is very sim-

ilar to the Viewer: it shows the number of comments

and “like”, it allows to see a particular comment and

to answer (this action is not possible in the Viewer).

In case of questionnaire, the Host shows the collected

data as depicted in Figure 1 and the Viewer shows the

question and the list of possible answers.

Finally, the Projector is the interface dedicated

to the room’s projector, if available. This is the

most simple interface because it only displays the

The speaker can decide to give or not this possibility.

MaySmartPhonesHelptoMaintainAudienceAttentionDuringPresentations?

slideshow and it does not allow any input or inter-

action. It also displays the number of comments and

likes of the slide currently shown.

The back-end component, the rectangle in Figure

2, contains a PPTX Converter and the Hub. The for-

mer converts a PowerPoint

presentation into a set of

HTML5 slides, the latter manages all the signals com-

ing from the host and from all the viewers, to maintain

the synchronization between the speaker and the au-

dience and to collect users’ feedback.

We must note here that a user from the audience

may temporarily deviate from the state of the presen-

tation imposed by the speaker, navigating through the

slides. The Hub does not re-synchronized this kind

of users, since a deviation from the current presen-

tation state is interpreted as the wish to navigate au-

tonomously. The user can decide, in every moment, to

re-sync with the presentation displayed by the Host,

clicking on the dedicated button. This is possible

thanks to the Hub which knows, in every moment, the

current state of the slideshow. Moreover, the Hub is

also used to send the correct slide to new viewers that

connect when the slideshow is already begun. In this

way, the Hub always guarantees synchronization be-

tween speaker and the audience.

4 SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

4.1 Managing Synchronization

The main task of the back-end component of the sys-

tem, and in particular of the Hub, is to maintain the

synchronization between all the devices connected

to the server, e.g. the presenter and audience de-

vices, and to manage all the exchanged messages.

The server is implemented using NodeJS, in particu-

lar with the Socket IO library (Socket IO, 2015), that

lets manage several parallel websocket connections

reducing transferred data and increasing synchroniza-

tion speed. As previously mentioned, the Hub com-

ponent has to be aware about the current slide of the

presentation, in order to be able to keep synchroniza-

tion between all the connected devices, and to sync a

new user that connects to the system.

In particular, the most important messages ex-

changed with the Hub are:

• change-slide: from Host to the Hub, notiﬁes that

the presenter has changed slide. This message is

then forwarded to all the followers currently syn-

chronized with the presentation to move to the

next slide;

• update-like and update-comment: from the Hub

to the Host, is used to update the number of “like”

or the comments of a slide of the presentation;

• user-resync: from the Viewer to the Hub, used to

sync the presentation of a viewer with the current

slide of the presenter. The Hub will answer with

the current slide of the presentation;

• user-navigation: from the Viewer to the Hub, in-

forms the Hub that the current device is no more

following the presenter, but is freely watching the

slideshow.

Other signals between the Hub, the Viewer and the

Host are exchanged to manage all the possible actions

that can be performed with our system.

As mentioned before, the system supports interac-

tivity between the presenter and the audience, in par-

ticular using interactive slides, that let the presenter

ask questions to the audience, i. e., multiple choice

questions or poll. When asked, people from the au-

dience have a particular slide that is dedicated to let

them submit their answer to the question. A speciﬁc

message with the provided answer is then sent to the

Hub, that collects all the answers from the audience

and will send the ﬁnal report to the Host. Then the

Host itself shows the result in a proper slide. An ex-

ample of the results of a poll is provided in Figure 1.

4.2 Module Converter

The module converter translates a PowerPoint

pre-

sentation into a set of HTML5 slides. We support only

the .pptx format and do not support the old format

.ppt, since the latter is not implemented using XML

language. A description of the support of other for-

mats is discussed in Section 5. We aims at a, as accu-

rately as possible, translation of the PowerPoint

pre-

sentation, considering images, text, animations and

transition effects.

The core of this module is an XML parser that

parses, in succession, the XML ﬁles that represent the

slides and identiﬁes the elements contained in every

single slide. Analyzing these elements, the converter

creates an HTML5 page adding the corresponding

HTML5 element, if there is one, or adding a partic-

ular combination of HTML5 elements to reproduce

the PowerPoint

object.

Consider, as an example, a slide containing an im-

age: the converter creates a div, and sets the right im-

age as source for its background-image property. The

basic information that are needed to correctly trans-

late a PowerPoint

image are: the source image, its

size, its position and its rotation. The information

about the source image is contained in the r:embed

attribute of the <a:blip> XML element: rId8 rep-

resents a unique ID that can be used to identify the

WEBIST2015-11thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

correct image (Fig. 4(a)). This ID must be searched

into a PowerPoint

’s relationships ﬁle, (Fig. 4(b)),

that is strictly connected to the slide XML ﬁle that

contains the picture element. The Target attribute

speciﬁes the image ﬁle for the picture identiﬁed by

the rId8 ID.

Picture’s position, size and rotation are contained

into the <a:xfrm> XML element. The root at-

tribute contains the image rotation. It is a simple type

that represents an angle in 60.000ths of a degree. Pos-

itive angles are clockwise (i.e., towards the positive y

axis); negative angles are counter-clockwise (i.e., to-

wards the negative y axis). In this example the image

is rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

The x and y attributes of the <a:off> element,

describe the picture position. Values are measured in

EMUs (English Metric Units)

and they represent a

distance from the top-left corner of the slide. In this

example, the image has no offset.

The cx and cy attributes of the <a:ext> element,

express the picture size, measured in EMUs. In our

example, the image has a size of 720x540 points.

Moreover, if the slide contains a text area, the

converter creates a div element, puts the text inside

it, and sets all the necessary properties to maintain

< p:pi c >

< p:b li p Fi ll >

< a: blip r: em bed = " r Id 8 " > ... </ a: blip >

...

</ p:b li pFi ll >

< p: spPr bw Mo de =" au to " >

< a: xfrm rot = " 5 400 00 0 " >

< a: of f x = "0" y = "0" / >

< a: ex t cx = " 914 40 00 " cy = " 6 85800 0 " / >

</ a: xf rm >

< a:p rs t Ge om prst = " rect " > ... </ a:p rs tGe om >

...

</ p: sp Pr >

</ p: pi c >

(a)

< R el ati ons hi p s xm ln s = " .. . " >

...

< R el ati on s hi p Id = " rId8 " T ar get = " ../ me di a /

im age5 . jp g "/>

...

</ Rel ati on s hi p s >

(b)

Figure 4: XML fragment of a .pptx presentation containing

an image (a) and its relationship ﬁle (b).

the correct font, font size, font color, alignment, line

spacing and format, used in PowerPoint

A EMU is deﬁned as 1/360.000 of a centimeter and

thus there are 914.400 EMUs per inch, and 12.700 EMUs

per point.

Figure 5: Wipe-in animation implemented in HTML5 and

CSS3. (a), (b), (c) show, progressively, how the main div

element, i. e. the green one, is expanded and how the red

rectangles are moved according to it.

The converter is written using the NodeJS plat-

form and Javascript language. First of all, it reads

the picture’s information, described above, from the

XML ﬁle. The second step is to convert this informa-

tion into valid CSS values. Images’ position and size

are converted in pixel, and images’ rotation values in

degrees; the size of the div element and of the font

are scaled, according to the window size, to allow to

adapt the slides to every device.

Moreover, since the slides are scaled to meet the

screen size of different devices, also the images con-

tained in the presentation must be scaled. This oper-

ation is performed on server side to obtain a second,

important, goal: to save network bandwidth. In fact,

it makes no sense to send a big image ﬁle, thus wast-

ing time and bandwidth, to show it smaller, according

to ﬁnal user interface.

The converter is able to translate slides which con-

tains objects like images, text-areas and shapes (only

squares and rectangles). The system can reproduce

user deﬁned layouts with good results and can recre-

ate a small set of PowerPoint

animations as fade-

in, fade-out, wipe-in (from left, right, bottom, top),

blink, entrance (from left, right, bottom, top) and exit

(from left, right, bottom, top). The set of supported

features, detailed in Table 1, is not complete but cov-

ers the most commonly used features, as discussed in

following section.

4.3 Animations

Animations have great importance and they are trans-

lated in the slides using features offered by CSS3

standard and Javascript. The converter reads the an-

imation information from the XML ﬁle: i. e., type,

duration, involved elements and triggers. For each an-

imation a speciﬁc CSS class is created and applied to

the correct HTML5 element, at the right moment. An-

imations are played in real-time by a Javascript func-

MaySmartPhonesHelptoMaintainAudienceAttentionDuringPresentations?

Table 1: Summary of supported elements and features of a

PowerPoint

presentation.

Elements Features

Text position, font, size, color, alignment

Images position, source, size, rotation, cutting

Text Boxes position, size, color background, text

(font, size, color and alignment)

Bullet lists position, color, type, text (font, size,

color and alignment)

Shapes

Square,

rectangle

position, size, color background,text

(font, size, color and alignment)

Animations

Fade-in,

Fade-out

duration, trigger (click or timer)

Slide-in,

Slide-out,

Wipe-in

duration, trigger (click or timer), di-

rection (from left, from right, from on

high, from on low)

Slide Layout

Layout

Grid

bullet list, title, etc. are displayed ac-

cording to the chosen layout

Background Slide background color

Placeholder header, footnote, date, slide count, title,

and text inherit their features from the

layout of the slide

tion executed by user’s internet browser.

It is important to note that the creation of anima-

tion inside HTML5 slide is not a simple translation

between XML tags. This comes from the fact that it

does not exist a correspondent CSS property for each

animations provided by PowerPoint

, but only for

the easiest one like fade-in and fade-out. Other type

of animations are supported manually creating the an-

imation effect.

Consider as an example the wipe-in (left) anima-

tion. It is an animation effect which reveals, progres-

sively, an object placed on the slide, increasing its

width, starting from a value equal to 0 pixels (the pic-

ture is not visible) and reaching the size of the object

(the image is completely visible). To further empha-

size the animation, a gradient effect is also applied

along the vertical right side that reveals the image.

This animation is implemented with the combination

of two simpler effects. The ﬁrst one changes the di-

mension of the div element which contains the ob-

ject, colored in green in Figure 5. This animation

is realized using a CSS3 transformation. The second

animation adds the gradient effect and its implemen-

tation is more difﬁcult. We create a number of div

elements which contain only a slice of the original

object. Then, different values of transparency are ap-

plied to these elements to simulate the gradient effect.

Moreover, all these elements are moved according to

the main div containing the object. The elements

which realize the gradient are colored in red in Fig-

ure 5. To better support mobile devices, this second

animation is facultative and it is not applied in case of

old device or device with low CPU resources.

5 TEST

5.1 Coverage Test

We tested our system in different ways. First, we col-

lected 16 sets of slides, created by 13 different au-

thors, for a total of 449 slides, and we tested how

many slides have been correctly translated and if any

error occurs during conversion. Presentations has

been selected from lectures’ slideshows and presen-

tation from commercial events; 15 out of 16 presen-

tations contain images, 9 out of 16 presentations con-

tains animations. The authors were not involved in

the development of our system and did not have any

notion about how it is built and its coverage of the

features under evaluation.

As already discussed in the previous section, our

converter does not fully support all PowerPoint

fea-

tures, but a reasonable set. We want to explore the ef-

fective coverage of features, since some PowerPoint

features are more widespread and other are seldom, if

ever, used by the authors.

We must note here that some features, if not sup-

ported, can be easily replaced by other without loss

of expressiveness of the presentation, e.g., a complex

animation can be replaced by a fade in. We asked to

one of the authors of the presentations and a devel-

oper of the system to grade the conversion of slides

from PowerPoint

using this rating scale:

• 0, if the converted slide lacked of important ele-

ments (or they are empty) and the slide failed to

convey its content;

• 1, if the converted slide contained some errors

which can be considered as “minor” since they al-

lowed to convey the slide’s content but with some

difﬁculty by the users, as depicted in Figure 6, and

• 2, if the converted slide was equal to the original

or conveyed with the same efﬁcacy its content.

We chose an author and a developer for the grad-

ing to combine a black-box approach, i. e., the au-

thor did not know anything about the development of

the system, and judgment from a person that knew

very well the system. When they did not agree on

the grade, we reported the opinion of the author since

she was not biased by grading something she has con-

tributed to develop. Therefore, reported results can be

considered a lower bound.

WEBIST2015-11thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

(a) Original Slide

(b) Converted Slide

Figure 6: An example of slide whose conversion contains

some errors: the font color of the title and the some shapes

(arrows and explosions) are not supported.

For each set of slides, we calculated the number

of total points available, i. e., the number of slides

multiplied by two, and the number of total points col-

lected. Our test showed that, on average, the pre-

sentations obtained 86% of available points, 78% of

the slides were fully graded, 19% of converted slides

contained some errors in the translation which can

worse the user experience and the efﬁcacy of the pre-

sentation to convey information, and only 4% of the

converted slides were evaluated to 0. Although 19%

could seem a large percentage, we must note that a

slide was graded to 1 if it was not equal to the original

one, but it was still able to convey the whole content.

So only the 4% of slides were not able to provide all

the information to the audience. The complete results

of this test are reported in Table 2, where we can see

that two presentations were fully graded.

These results showed that, even if the coverage of

PowerPoint

features is not complete, but we plan

it would be in the future, it allowed to translate ef-

ﬁciently many presentations. As an example, text

was always completely converted, but some prob-

lems might arise when bullet lists were included in

the default layout and not explicitly deﬁned. In this

case the tool created a list of items, without the bul-

let, therefore the content was correctly conveyed. At

the moment, the list of unsupported features contains,

among others, geometric ﬁgures (we implement only

squares and rectangles), gradients and tables. Only

Table 2: Percentuage of slides evaluated with 0 (Class 0), 1

(Class 1) or 2 (Class 2) points for each set of slides analysed

during the test phase.

Set # Class 0 Class 1 Class 2

Set 1 0% 0% 100%

Set 2 0% 28,57% 71,43%

Set 3 3,54% 23,01% 73,45%

Set 4 10,53% 36,84% 52,63%

Set 5 9,68% 16,13% 74,19%

Set 6 0% 25% 75%

Set 7 0% 13,64% 86,36%

Set 8 26,67% 13,33% 60%

Set 9 7,14% 16,67% 76,19%

Set 10 0% 26,32% 73,68%

Set 11 0% 21,5% 87,5%

Set 12 0% 20% 80%

Set 13 0% 25% 75%

Set 14 0% 22,22% 77,78%

Set 15 0% 54,55% 45,45%

Set 16 0% 0% 100%

Average 3,56% 18,71% 77,72%

some types of animation are supported, in case of un-

supported types, the converter introduces a fade in/out

according if the animation puts or removes the object

on/from the screen.

We must note here that, even if the set of presen-

tations was relatively low, 16, they covered different

authors, coming from different environment, ranging

from public universities to companies, and even the

presentations goals were very different (lessons, ad-

vertising, promulgation, etc).

5.2 Tests with Real Users

As a second test of the system, we tried to “mea-

sure”, in some way, how much the system helps to

increase users engagement and interaction. Consider-

ing that the user probably has paid attention to the talk

if he/she declare to like one or more slides and, in the

same way, the user has to pay attention to the presen-

ter to be able to answer to a questionnaire, the number

of interactions can be considered a rough “measure”

of the potential of the system to help to maintain users

attention during a presentation.

We analyzed the behavior of students of a course

of “Web Technologies” at the undergraduate program

in “Computer Science” at the University of Padua in

Italy during two lessons. Both the lessons proposed

the same topic, exercises on XML technologies (i. e.,

XMLSchema and DTD) and were organized in the

same way. The teacher proposed some exercises to

the students and their solutions. A set of eight closed

questions with a predeﬁned set of possible answers

MaySmartPhonesHelptoMaintainAudienceAttentionDuringPresentations?

helped the discussion about the goodness of the pro-

posed solutions.

Since the students were the same for both the

lessons, exercises and questions were different to

avoid annoying them. In the ﬁrst lesson, we used the

system described in this paper to allow the students to

answer the questions and to record data about interac-

tion. In the second lesson, the students were required

to raise their hand to answer to the question when they

agree with one of the possible answers and the teacher

counted the number of raised hands to record data.

During the ﬁrst lesson, 96 users registered to the

system, 55 of them as “anonymous”. The system

recorded 215 answers to the eight questions, on aver-

age, nearly 27 answers to each question. This number

could seem low considering the number of users fol-

lowing the lesson, but we must note here that the ques-

tions were not easy for the students and they knew the

system was recording their interactions so they want

to avoid to give wrong answers. Nevertheless, con-

sidering only the authenticated students, the number

of answers per users was, on average, 2,68.

The teacher counted 94 students attending the sec-

ond lesson. In this case the number of answers to each

question was, on average, 4, 5, so the use of the sys-

tem, during this test, increased nearly six times the

number of answers. We must note here that this result

can be due to many factors as, for example, the age

and gender of the participants, but it is clear that the

use of a device to answer, instead of a raised hand,

can help to increase the number of received answers

in a very signiﬁcant way.

Finally, we collected data in 37 commercial pre-

sentations, where the system was used by different

companies which aimed at increasing users engage-

ment and attention during the presentation of their

products. Five out of these 37 events were on-line

presentations, the others were on-site. During these

events, 3753 users accessed the slideshow using our

system (2372 during the two on-line events, 1381

users were following the events on-site). Unfortu-

nately, we were not always able to collect the number

of people attending the events, but in the 11 events for

which we know the number of attending people, on

average, 75% of the audience followed the slideshows

using their smartphones or tablets, with a peak of

100% for an event.

During the 37 slideshows, the users liked, on the

whole, 4842 slides; the average of like operations per

user is 1, 66. In particular an event reaches 8, 59 “like”

per user.

The users ﬁlled out 2266 questionnaires, shared

38 slides on Facebook and sent 175 slides by email.

Moreover, the system collected 920 comments.

All these data shows that the system is able to per-

suade users to interact with the presentation, and this

is an interesting result. When we can collect the num-

ber of participants, we recorded that the system has

involved, on average, 75% of the audience. More-

over, by interacting with the presentation, the users

also gave some information about themselves to the

server, e. g. the email, and this is really useful during

commercial presentation since this data can be used

to re-contact people after the event. In the same way,

information like time spent viewing each slide can be

used for commercial purpose, since it can help to un-

derstand what has most interested the user.

Since the number of interactions with the system

is only a rough measure of its ability to engage users,

at the end of the last three events we asked to the audi-

ence to answer a question about their satisfaction with

the system: 1090 users answered the question (85% of

the total audience), 63% of the users gave a very pos-

itive evaluation, 36% gave a positive evaluation and

only 1% of the users gave a negative evaluation of the

system, therefore we can state that the users liked the

proposed system.

Finally, these tests have shown that the sys-

tem is not simply a prototype but its coverage of

PowerPoint

features is sufﬁcient to make it usable.

Moreover, during all these tests, both the users and

the speakers never reported problems in the synchro-

nization of the slides.

5.3 Tests with Other Formats

During the whole test phase we considered also

other format, i. e., presentation created with Ap-

ple Keynote

or OpenOfﬁce. In particular, we stud-

ied the ODF format(Organization for the Advance-

ment of Structured Information Standards (OASIS),

2005), but it resulted completely different from the

OOXML format(ECMA International, 2012) used by

PowerPoint

, therefore our converter is currently not

able to support this format. But our system, with some

limitations, can be used also to distribute presenta-

tions created with Keynote

or OpenOfﬁce, using a

converter from the output from these software to the

OOXML format.

We tested three set of slide generated by other

software and then converted to the OOXML format.

The obtained results, converted with our system, were

evaluated with the same method described above:

each slide was evaluated to 0, 1 or 2 according to

the quality of the conversion, by the same people dis-

cussed in Section 5.1.

The results shown that, on average, the presenta-

tions got 89% of the total available points. In partic-

WEBIST2015-11thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

ular, on average, 83% of the slides were fully graded,

12% received a score of 1 point, and only 5% of the

slides were evaluated to 0. Therefore, we can assume

that even in case of presentation generated with other

software, the result of the converter is quite the same.

This means that ﬁles which use ODP format, con-

verted to the OOXML format, are usable as an input

ﬁle for our converter, thus expanding the type of sup-

ported ﬁle, and so, the number of convertible presen-

tations. However, in this case, in addition to the errors

introduced by our system, there may be additional er-

rors generated by the conversion of a presentation to

the OOXML format.

6 CONCLUSION

In this paper we propose a system to distribute pre-

sentations to smartphones and tablet to make presen-

tations more interactive, adding questionnaires and

polls, and to improve users engagement.

The main component of our system is a converter

which is able to translate PowerPoint

slides into

web pages using HTML5. The user may access to

the slides, comment on them, and make other social

activities. Our tests showed that the system was able

to involve, on average, 75% of the audience, and to

make users more interactive (one test reported up to

six time more interactive) with respect to presenta-

tion based only on slides. Therefore, the use of smart-

phone to distribute slides is promising.

Moreover, interaction can continue also after the

talk, using the system in the on-line mode, which

gives the possibility to navigate slides and leave com-

ments. This last mechanism can be even more useful

after the end of the talk to continue discussion with

participants/clients. We must note here that our so-

lution collect many data about the users, i. e., data

about navigation and email, therefore some privacy

issues arise. To partially solve this problem, the sys-

tem allows the user to skip the authentication step and

logs in as anonymous. In this case, the system does

not record any email, so this user cannot be contacted

in the future. However this is not a complete solution.

Future works will be investigate how to clarify to the

user that his/her activity is registered. Moreover, we

want to increase the number of supported features and

to explore the possibility to show users comments on

a slide even on the projector screen. Actually, the pro-

jector shows the number of comments per slide, but

not the comments themselves. We are currently im-

plementing a new component, the Moderator inter-

face, which can be used to select comment to display

to all the users.

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MaySmartPhonesHelptoMaintainAudienceAttentionDuringPresentations?