# Designing a Collaborative Virtual Conference Application: Challenges, Requirements and Guidelines
## 7 Conclusions and Future Works  
In this paper, a usability study was carried out to determine the issues faced by users while performing collaborative activities on current virtual conference applications. Our findings show that most of the features offered by existing applications are not fully utilized. It was also discovered that users found common collaborative features such as file sharing, whiteboard, and annotation features difficult to use. A simpler, more intuitive, interface design is needed to better assist users. The study also revealed that most participants would prefer to turn off the web camera for reasons of privacy, internet instability, and  
Figure 12: The user interface of the proposed virtual conference application for remote collaboration when users enter the group.  
reducing mobile data consumption. Participants, on the other hand, rated positively on the collaborative experience and system usability as acceptable.  
Following that, the paper described a set of design guidelines to address the issues raised. This includes ways to encourage collaborative usage by redesigning the interface to look more like the real world. Other solutions included providing avatar-based virtual characters that consume less data, improve privacy, and increase social awareness among participants.  
One of the goals of this study is to understand more about human-to-human distance communication through technology, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The study also contributes to the research community by providing guidelines for improving collaboration and affective sharing, which are often lacking in current virtual conference applications.  
One of the study's limitations was that it only tested one application (Zoom) for the experiment. It would be interesting to compare different types of virtual conference applications to determine the issues and challenges. Another limitation is that the study did not consider participants with different backgrounds for the experiments due to the pandemic and the consequential restriction of movement control order. An extension of the study will be conducted, and participants from different backgrounds will be considered to gain a better representation.  
The next step is to redesign the interface of a virtual conference application to make it more user-friendly, thereby encouraging collaboration among users. An avatar-based solution to increase social awareness and social presence of group members is also in the works, where affective qualities can be communicated among group members without the need to publicly enable the web camera. In the near future, this study will include log recordings in addition to the self-reporting that is currently in place. This should provide a better insight to further understand the behavior of users when performing collaborative activities online in a more natural setting.  
Project administration, T.R.M.; formal analysis, T.R.M.; data curation, T.R.M.; methodology, T.R.M.; investigation, T.R.M.; writing--original draft preparation, T.R.M.; Conceptualization, N.M.N.; writing--review and editing, N.M.N. and A.K.; Funding acquisition, N.M.N.; supervision, N.M.N., R.W. and A.K.; validation, R.W. and A.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by Universiti Putra Malaysia under the High Impact Putra Grant project code GP/2017/9549600 and the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology Trust Fund code 6211200.  
Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.  
The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.  
The authors would like to express their great appreciation to the respondents who voluntarily took part in this study, as well as the students and researchers at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UPM, for providing valuable editing and writing advice.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.