Carl Gutwin

A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise forimproving the usability of real-time distributed groupware.However, there is little principled information available aboutawareness that can be used by groupware designers. In thisarticle, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for thepurpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of groupawareness called workspace awareness. We focus on how smallgroups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sizedshared workspaces – tasks where group members frequently shiftbetween individual and shared activities during the work session.We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept ofworkspace awareness and that helps designers understand theconcept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware.The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make upworkspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintainawareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness incollaboration. The framework also organizes previous research onawareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabularyand a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, forcomparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluationresults. The basic structure of the theory can be used todescribe other kinds of awareness that are important to theusability of groupware.

KEA: practical automatic keyphrase extraction

Keyphrases provide semantic metadata that summarize and characterize documents. This paper describes Kea, an algorithm for automatically extracting keyphrases from text. Kea identifies candidate keyphrases using lexical methods, calculates feature values for each candidate, and uses a machinelearning algorithm to predict which candidates are good keyphrases. The machine learning scheme first builds a prediction model using training documents with known keyphrases, and then uses the model to find keyphrases in new documents. We use a large test corpus to evaluate Kea’s effectiveness in terms of how many author-assigned keyphrases are correctly identified. The system is simple, robust, and publicly available.

Group awareness in distributed software development

Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.

Design for individuals, design for groups: tradeoffs between power and workspace awareness

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.

Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware: Framework, Widgets, and Evaluation

The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical workspaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others’ interaction with the task environment. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual space for collaboration, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with their physical counterparts. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and apply the framework to the design of widgets that help people maintain awareness in real-time distributed groupware. Our evaluation of these widgets has shown that several designs improve the usability of groupware applications.

A usability study of awareness widgets in a shared workspace groupware system

Workspace awareness is knowledge about others’ interaction with a shared workspace. Groupware systems provide only limited information about other participants, often compromising workspace awareness. This paper describes a usability study of several widgets designed to help maintain awareness in a groupware workspace. These widgets include a miniature view, a radar view, a multiuser scrollbar, and a “what you see is what I do” view. The study examined the widgets’ information content, how easily people could interpret them, and whether they were useful or distracting. Experimenter observations, subject questionnaires, and interviews indicate that the miniature and radar displays are useful and valuable for tasks involving spatial manipulation of artifacts.

Task analysis for groupware usability evaluation: Modeling shared-workspace tasks with the mechanics of collaboration

Researchers in Computer Supported Cooperative Work have recently developed discount evaluation methods for shared-workspace groupware. Most discount methods rely on some understanding of the context in which the groupware systems will be used, which means that evaluators need to model the tasks that groups will perform. However, existing task analysis schemes are not well suited to the needs of groupware evaluation: they either do not deal with collaboration issues, do not use an appropriate level of analysis for concrete assessment of usability in interfaces, or do not adequately represent the variability inherent in group work. To fill this gap, we have developed a new modeling technique called Collaboration Usability Analysis. CUA focuses on the teamwork that goes on in a group task rather than the taskwork. To enable closer links between the task representation and the groupware interface, CUA grounds each collaborative action in a set of group work primitives called the mechanics of collaboration. To represent the range of ways that a group task can be carried out, CUA allows variable paths through the execution of a task, and allows alternate paths and optional tasks to be modeled. CUAs main contribution is to provide evaluators with a framework in which they can simulate the realistic use of a groupware system and identify usability problems that are caused by the groupware interface.

Improving browsing in digital libraries with keyphrase indexes

Abstract Browsing accounts for much of peoples interaction with digital libraries, but it is poorly supported by standard search engines. Conventional systems often operate at the wrong level, indexing words when people think in terms of topics, and returning documents when people want a broader view. As a result, users cannot easily determine what is in a collection, how well a particular topic is covered, or what kinds of queries will provide useful results. We have built a new kind of search engine, Keyphind, that is explicitly designed to support browsing. Automatically extracted keyphrases form the basic unit of both indexing and presentation, allowing users to interact with the collection at the level of topics and subjects rather than words and documents. The keyphrase index also provides a simple mechanism for clustering documents, refining queries, and previewing results. We compared Keyphind to a traditional query engine in a small usability study. Users reported that certain kinds of browsing tasks were much easier with the new interface, indicating that a keyphrase index would be a useful supplement to existing search tools.

The effects of workspace awareness support on the usability of real-time distributed groupware

Real-time collaboration in current distributed groupware workspaces is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness—the understanding of who is in the workspace, where they are working, and what they are doing—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 other people in the workspace as well. We examined five aspects of groupware usability: task completion times, communication efficiency, the participants’ perceived-effort, overall preference, and strategy use. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower in the awareness-enhanced system, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. The additional awareness information also allowed people to use different and more effective strategies to complete the tasks. Participants greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence that support for workspace awareness improves the usability of groupware, and uncovers some of the reasons underlying this improvement.

Support for workspace awareness in educational groupware

Real-time educational groupware systems allow physically separated learners to work together in a shared virtual workspace at the same time. These systems do not yet approach the interaction richness of a face-to-face learning situation. In particular, one element poorly supported is workspace awareness: the up-to-the-minute knowledge a student requires about other students’ interactions with the shared workspace. This awareness is essential if students are to learn and work together effectively. We present a framework of several types of awareness required by students in a collaborative learning situation, including their social, task, concept and workspace awareness. We then concentrate on workspace awareness, and describe how particular awareness requirements of students in group learning situations depend on the closeness of their tasks, and whether they are sharing the same view or have separate views into the workspace. From these requirements, we have prototyped several awareness widgets for educational groupware. These widgets help learners maintain awareness of other learners’ locations when their views are separated, of other learners’ activities in shared and separate view situations, and of other learners’ past activities.