The moderator of an InterviewMR session is an important role, as they have additional responsibilities during the operation of the session, as well as acting as the interviewer, putting your questions to the consumer attendees. Moderators also have the ability to reassign the presenting role to other users and maintain full admin control throughout the session. To get started, you’ll need to go to your InterviewMR project, and then in the ‘Sessions’ tab you will see an open padlock icon (shown below) next to the name of your InterviewMR session. This icon will only appear for those accounts that have been set as the ‘moderator’ for that particular InterviewMR session.
Once you click on the padlock icon, you’ll be taken to the waiting room for the InterviewMR session, where you can adjust your settings in the waiting room and once ready ‘Join’ the session. Clicking this button as the moderator also opens the session for all other attendees who can then select ‘Join’ from the waiting room.
User settings
There are several settings available for both client and consumer users of InterviewMR that allow them to change their speaker, microphone and webcam. For each of these settings, when clicked, all available cameras, microphones and speakers connected to your device will be listed, should you want to change these.
The red headphones and camera icons in the lower half of the screen (shown below) also allow you to turn your camera and microphone off and on at any time before and during the session.
Moderator controls
Once you have clicked ‘Join’ you will then be taken into the InterviewMR session and will have additional settings available to you as the moderator of the session.
Sharing your screen
Should you wish to share your screen with participants or wish for participants to share their screen with you, this can be done by selecting the ‘share screen’ icon below (monitor with an arrow pointing upwards) and you can then select whether to present either a specific window or an entire screen.
By selecting the arrow to the right of the ‘share screen’ icon, you can choose to either let participants share their screen or limit this to only allow the host and manager to share their screen. You can toggle between these two options during the session, with the currently selected option highlighted with a tick next to it, by default only hosts and managers can share their screen. Only one attendee at a time will be able to share their screen at a time.
While you are screen sharing, the below widget will appear and remain visible (within the browser tab for your InterviewMR session) as long as you are still sharing your screen. You can temporarily pause and resume sharing your screen by selecting the ‘pause’/’play’ button on this widget, e.g., to ease transition through multiple pages while screen sharing. To stop sharing your screen, select the ‘Stop sharing’ button on this widget.
Annotating your InterviewMR
When sharing your screen users are able to annotate this screenshare in various ways to highlight and draw attention to areas of the screen. Annotations are on by default but can be switched of by the moderator by clicking the below pencil icon.
Once sharing, all users are able to annotate the shared page and all users can see these annotations.
Users can change the appearance of their annotations with the below options;
Clear – removes all annotations that you have made
Shapes – Allows users to use shapes such as circles to highlight an area
Colour – allows users to change the colour of their annotations
Pen – switches back to annotation pen from other options such as mouse
Redo – reapplies previously undone annotations
Undo – undoes the last annotation, can be used multiple times to undo several annotations
Erase – Changes pen to an eraser to remove previous annotations
Mouse – returns user to their mouse from the annotation pen
Recording your InterviewMR
Once you enter an InterviewMR session it will begin to record automatically, but this can be paused temporarily or completely stopped should you wish. To pause the recording, select the ‘pause’ icon at the bottom of the screen, or select the square ‘stop’ icon to stop recording completely. While recording is paused, you will see a ‘play’ icon that will start the recording again. When recording has been stopped, you will see a circular ‘record’ icon that lets you start recording again.
All recordings are then saved and are available to view, edit and share in VideoMR.
Manging Consumers
There are several actions that can be taken by moderators in order to manage the flow of an InterviewMR session. These steps allow for the moderator to ensure that they can be heard and also to give the focus to consumer users where appropriate. To access this customer menu you can click the button below;
Make host
By selecting the menu on a single consumer, you are able to set another user as the host of the session. As host the user has additional abilities within the session including assigning the host back to another user. We recommend using this for clint level accounts in order to change the moderator priority during the group.
Make manager
When a user is marked as a manager, they will gain the additional feature of being able to pause, stop and restart the recording. We recommend only using the manager role for client level accounts as this gives users control over other attendees.
Change name
Should a user have personal information in their screen name, or a potentially offensive username, this can be reset by the moderator of the session.
Remove
Exactly as it sounds, selecting ‘Remove’ on a user will remove them from the InterviewMR session and return them to the homepage.
Mute all
Muting all members is as simple as clicking the ’Mute All’ button at the bottom of the Participant list and will mute all consumer attendees. This is great for opening and closing sessions and allows the moderator to be heard above all attendees.