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A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for RealTime Groupware
- Computer Supported Cooperative Work
, 2002
"... Abstract. Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory o ..."
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Cited by 251 (26 self)
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Abstract. Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces – tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware. Key words: awareness, groupware design, groupware usability, real-time distributed groupware, situation awareness, shared workspaces, workspace awareness
Design for Individuals, Design for Groups: Tradeoffs Between Power and Workspace Awareness
, 1998
"... Users of synchronous groupware systems act both as individuals and as members of a group, and designers must try to support both roles. However, the requirements of individuals and groups often conflict, forcing designers to support one at the expense of the other. The tradeoff is particularly evide ..."
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Cited by 185 (20 self)
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Users of synchronous groupware systems act both as individuals and as members of a group, and designers must try to support both roles. However, the requirements of individuals and groups often conflict, forcing designers to support one at the expense of the other. The tradeoff is particularly evident in the design of interaction techniques for shared workspaces. Individuals demand powerful and flexible means for interacting with the workspace and its artifacts, while groups require information about each other to maintain awareness. Although these conflicting requirements present real problems to designers, the tension can be reduced in some cases. We consider the tradeoff in three areas of groupware design: workspace navigation, artifact manipulation, and view representation. We show techniques such as multiple viewports, process feedthrough, action indicators, and view translations that support the needs of both individuals and groups.
Partitioning Digital Worlds: Focal and Peripheral Awareness in Multiple Monitor Use
, 2001
"... Software today does not help us partition our digital worlds effectively. We do it ourselves. This field study of users of multiple monitors examines how people with a lot of display space organize and arrange information. Their second monitors are not generally used as extra workspace, they are use ..."
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Cited by 183 (1 self)
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Software today does not help us partition our digital worlds effectively. We do it ourselves. This field study of users of multiple monitors examines how people with a lot of display space organize and arrange information. Their second monitors are not generally used as extra workspace, they are used for secondary activities related to principal tasks, for peripheral awareness of information that is not the main focus, and for easy access to resources. The second monitor improves efficiency in ways that may be difficult to measure yet can have substantial subjective effect. The study provides specific illustrations of shortcomings of today's systems and applications: The way we work online could be improved substantially at relatively low cost. Keywords Awareness, multiple monitors, displays INTRODUCTION As more of our activities are supported digitally, we use more applications and devices, at work, in the home, on the move. The goal of getting information to and from "anyone, any...
Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context Aware Systems
- HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
, 2001
"... This essay considers the problem of defining the context that context aware systems should pay attention to from a human perspective. In particular, we argue that there are human aspects of context that cannot be sensed or even inferred by technological means, so context aware systems cannot be desi ..."
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Cited by 112 (1 self)
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This essay considers the problem of defining the context that context aware systems should pay attention to from a human perspective. In particular, we argue that there are human aspects of context that cannot be sensed or even inferred by technological means, so context aware systems cannot be designed simply to act on our behalf. Rather they will have to be able to defer to users in an efficient and non-obtrusive fashion. Our point is particularly relevant for systems that are constructed such that applications are architecturally isolated from the sensing and inferencing that governs their behavior. We propose a design framework that is intended to guide thinking about accommodating human aspects of context. This framework presents four design principles that support intelligibility of system behavior and accountability of human users and a number of human-salient details of context that must be accounted for in context aware system design.
Notification and Awareness: Synchronizing Task-Oriented Collaborative Activity.
- International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
, 2003
"... Abstract: People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions, and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks, and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent an ..."
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Cited by 110 (19 self)
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Abstract: People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions, and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks, and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analyzed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system-stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task, and tool support-to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity.
The Effects of Workspace Awareness Support on the Usability of Real-Time Distributed Groupware
- ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
, 1999
"... This article is a substantially expanded version of a report presented at the 1998 ACM CHI conference [Gutwin and Greenberg 1998]. Authors' addresses: C. Gutwin, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A9, Canada; email: gutwin@c ..."
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Cited by 105 (8 self)
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This article is a substantially expanded version of a report presented at the 1998 ACM CHI conference [Gutwin and Greenberg 1998]. Authors' addresses: C. Gutwin, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A9, Canada; email: gutwin@cs.usask.ca; S. Greenberg, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada; email: saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca. Permission to make digital / hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and / or a fee
Flexible Collaboration Transparency: Supporting Worker Independence in Replicated Application-Sharing Systems
, 1998
"... This dissertation analyzes the usefulness of existing "conventional" collaboration-transparency systems, which permit the shared use of legacy, single-user applications. I find that conventional collaboration-transparency systems do not use network resources efficiently, and they impose an ..."
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Cited by 87 (5 self)
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This dissertation analyzes the usefulness of existing "conventional" collaboration-transparency systems, which permit the shared use of legacy, single-user applications. I find that conventional collaboration-transparency systems do not use network resources efficiently, and they impose an inflexible, tightly coupled style of collaboration because they do not adequately support important groupware principles: concurrent work, relaxed WYSIWIS, group awareness, and inherently collaborative tasks. This dissertation proposes and explores solutions to those deficiencies. The primary goal of this work is to maintain the benefits of collaboration transparency while relieving some of its disadvantages. To that end, I present an alternate implementation approach that provides many features previously seen only in applications specifically designed to support cooperative work, called collaboration-aware applications. The new approach uses a replicated architecture, in which a copy of the application resides on each user's machine, and the users' input events are broadcast to each copy. I discuss solutions to certain key problems in replicated architectures, such as maintaining consistency, unanticipated sharing, supporting late-joiners, and replicating system resources (e.g., files, sockets, and random number generators). To enhance the collaborative usability of a legacy application, the new approach transparently replaces selected single-user interface objects with multi-user versions at runtime. There are four requirements of an application platform needed to implement this approach: process migration, run-time object replacement, dynamic binding, and the ability to intercept and introduce low-level user input events. As an instance of this approach, I describe its incorpor...
A review of overview+detail, zooming, and focus+context interfaces
- ACM COMPUT. SURV
, 2008
"... There are many interface schemes that allow users to work at, and move between, focused and contextual views of a data set. We review and categorise these schemes according to the interface mechanisms used to separate and blend views. The four approaches are overview+detail, which uses a spatial sep ..."
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Cited by 86 (1 self)
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There are many interface schemes that allow users to work at, and move between, focused and contextual views of a data set. We review and categorise these schemes according to the interface mechanisms used to separate and blend views. The four approaches are overview+detail, which uses a spatial separation between focused and contextual views; zooming, which uses a temporal separation; focus+context, which minimizes the seam between views by displaying the focus within the context; and cue-based techniques which selectively highlight or suppress items within the information space. Critical features of these categories, and empirical evidence of their success, are discussed. The aim is to provide a succinct summary of the state-of-the-art, to illuminate successful and unsuccessful interface strategies, and to identify potentially fruitful areas for further work.
Effects of Awareness Support on Groupware Usability
- ACM Transactions on CHI
, 1999
"... www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin Collaboration in current real-time groupware systems is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people’s ..."
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Cited by 86 (17 self)
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www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin Collaboration in current real-time groupware systems is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people’s performance on two versions of a groupware interface. The interfaces used workspace miniatures to provide different levels of support for workspace awareness. The basic miniature showed information only about the local user, and the enhanced miniature showed the location and activity of others in the workspace as well. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower with increased awareness support, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. Participants also greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence of, and underlying reasons for, the value of supporting workspace awareness in groupware.
The Importance of Awareness for Team Cognition in Distributed Collaboration
- In
, 2001
"... Introduction Although the phrase team cognition suggests something that happens inside people's heads, teams are very much situated in the real world, and there are a number of things that have to happen out in that world for teams to be able to think and work together. This is not just spoken ..."
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Cited by 71 (10 self)
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Introduction Although the phrase team cognition suggests something that happens inside people's heads, teams are very much situated in the real world, and there are a number of things that have to happen out in that world for teams to be able to think and work together. This is not just spoken communication. Depending on the circumstances, effective team cognition includes things like using environmental cues to establish a common ground of understanding, seeing who is around and what they are doing, monitoring the state of artefacts in a shared work setting, noticing other people's gestures and what they are referring to, and so on (Clark, 1996; Hutchins, 1996). In this chapter, we will argue that awareness of other group members is a critical building block in the construct of team cognition, and consequently that computational support for awareness in groupware systems is crucial for supporting team cognition in distributed groups. Our main message is that: ... for people to sust
