Mary Beth Rosson

Scenario-based design

Publisher Summary Opening up the design process to the intended users and descriptions of their projected use entail many technical issues. People need to develop new vocabularies for discussing and characterizing designs in terms of the projected activities of the intended users. These vocabularies should be accessible to the users, so that they can help define the technology they will use. People also need to be able to integrate and coordinate such use-oriented design representations with other representations produced in the course of system development. Further, people need to be able to assess design alternatives with use-oriented criteria and to integrate and coordinate such assessments with those that they make on traditional grounds, like correctness, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. People need to develop new sorts of tools and techniques to support the development and use of use-oriented representations and methods in design. People also need to produce education to help system developers understand the need for use oriented approaches and adopt such methods in their work. This is a lot to ask for, but to do anything less is to risk losing sight of the line among human beings using and controlling their technology and its antithesis.

Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity

People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one anothers 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 analysed 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.

Developing the Blacksburg electronic village

facilitate interaction among individuals who are physically remote—in distributed work groups and interest groups. Why would anyone want a network connection to their next-door neighbor? In fact, community networks are a big idea. Over the past 20 years, since the Community Memory project in Developing the Almost half the population of Blacksburg, Virginia are Internet veterans, having spent the past three years at the core of one of the most advanced community network projects in the U.S. Berkeley, Calif., the idea has caught on in hundreds of community networks across North America and the world. They provide forums for community discussion and access to government, public health information, economic development , and public education. In most cases, they started as outreach or service projects of universities , as initiatives of local governments, and as public interest projects of energetic citizens. They offer a unique vision of grassroots technology development [1–3, 5, 11]. In January 1994, we became professors at Vir-ginia Tech, residents of Blacksburg, Virginia, and participant-observers in the Blacksburg Electronic Village. This article is an overview of our observations, discussions, and projects within the local community network. The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), in operation since October 1993, is a technologically advanced community network. The project was originally constituted as a partnership among the town of Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, and Bell Atlantic to improve community networking service to the level available on the Vir-ginia Tech campus. Bell Atlantic agreed to install a Number 5 ESS digital electronic switch and to run T1 ethernet to the public library as well as to several hundred apartments and some

Weak ties in networked communities

Communities with high levels of social capital are likely to have a higher quality of life than communities with low social capital (Coleman, 1988, 1990; Putnam, 1993, 2000). This is due to the greater ability of such communities to organize and mobilize effectively for collective action because they have high levels of social trust, social networks, and well-established norms of mutuality (the major features of social capital). Communities with bridging social capital (weak ties across groups) as well as bonding social capital (strong ties within groups) are the most effective in organizing for collective action (Granovetter, 1973; Putnam, 2000). People who belong to multiple groups act as bridging ties Simmel [1908] 1950; Wellman, 1988). When people with bridging ties use communication media, such as the Internet, they enhance their capability to educate community members, and organize, as needed, for collective action. This paper summarizes evidence from stratified household survey data in Blacksburg, Virginia showing that people with weak (bridging) ties across groups have higher levels of community involvement, civic interest and collective efficacy than people without bridging ties to groups. Moreover, heavy Internet users with bridging ties have higher social engagement, use the Internet for social purposes, and have been attending more local meetings and events since going online than heavy Internet users with no bridging ties. These findings may suggest that the Internet - in the hands of bridging individuals -- is a tool for maintaining social relations, information exchange, and increasing face-to-face interaction, all of which help to build both bonding and bridging social capital in communities.

Flexible collaboration transparency: supporting worker independence in replicated application-sharing systems

This article presents a critique of conventional collaboration transparency systems, also called “application-sharing” systems, which provide the real-time shared use of legacy single-user applications. We find that conventional collaboration transparency systems are inefficient in their use of network resources and lack support for key groupware principles: concurrent work, relaxed WYSIWIS, and group awareness. Next, we present an alternative approach to implementing collaboration transparency that provides many features previously seen only in collaboration-aware applicaitons. Our approach is based on a replicated architecture where selected single-user interface components are dynamically replaced by multiuser versions. The replacement occurs at run-time and is transparent to the single-user application and its developers.. As an instance of this approach, we describe its incorporation into a Java-based collaboration transparency system for serializable, Swing-based Java applications, called Flexible JAMM (Java Applets Made Multiuser). To validate that the flexible collaboration transparency system is truly an improvement over conventional systems, we conducted an empirical study of collaborators performing both tightly and loosely coupled tasks using Flexible JAMM versus a representative conventional collaboration transparency system, Microsoft NetMeeting. Completion times were significantly faster in the loosely coupled task using Flexible JAMM and were not adversely affected in the tightly coupled task. Accuracy was equivalent for both systems. Participants greatly preferred Flexible JAMM.

The development of cooperation: five years of participatory design in the virtual school

During the past five years, our research group worked with a group of public school teachers to define, develop, and assess network-based support for collaborative learning in middle school physical science and high school physics. From the outset, we committed to a participatory design approach. This design collaboration has now existed far longer than is typical of participatory design endeavors, particularly in North America. The nature of our interactions, and in particular the nature of the role played by the teachers has changed significantly through the course of the project. We suggest that there may be a long-term developmental unfolding of roles and relationships in participatory design.

The reuse of uses in Smalltalk programming

Software reuse, a long-standing and refractory issue in software technology, has been specifically emphasized as an advantage of the object-oriented programming paradigm. We report an empirical study of expert Smalltalk programmers reusing user interface classes in small graphical applications. Our primary goal was to develop a qualitative characterization of expert reuse strategies that could be used to identify requirements for teaching and supporting reuse programming. A secondary interest was to demonstrate to these experts the Reuse View Matcher—a prototype reuse tool—and to collect some initial observations of this tool in use during reuse programming. We observed extensive “reuse of uses” in the programmers work: they relied heavily on code in expample applications that provided an implicit specification for reuse of the target class. We called this implicit specification a “usage context.” The programmers searched for relevant usage contexts early. They repeatedly evaluated the contextualized information to develop solution plans, and they borrowed and adapted it when the sample context suited their immediate reuse goals. The process of code development was highly dynamic and incremental; analysis and implementation were tightly interleaved, frequently driven by testing and debugging. These results are considered in terms of the tradeoffs that inhere in the reuse of uses and the teaching and tool support that might improve the efficiency and accuracy of this approach to reuse.

Requirements development in scenario-based design

We describe and analyze the process of requirements development in scenario based design through consideration of a case study. In our project, a group of teachers and system developers initially set out to create a virtual physics laboratory. Our design work centered on the collaborative development of a series of scenarios describing current and future classroom activities. We observed classroom scenarios to assess needs and opportunities, and envisioned future scenarios to specify and analyze possible design moves. We employed claims analysis to evaluate design trade-offs implicit in these scenarios, to codify the specific advantages and disadvantages in achieving requirements. Through the course of this process, the nature of our project requirements has evolved, providing more information but also more kinds of information. We discuss the utility of managing requirements development through an evolving set of scenarios, and the generality of the scenario stages from this case study.

Classroom BRIDGE: using collaborative public and desktop timelines to support activity awareness

Classroom BRIDGE supports activity awareness by facilitating planning and goal revision in collaborative, project-based middle school science. It integrates large-screen and desktop views of project times to support incidental creation of awareness information through routine document transactions, integrated presentation of awareness information as part of workspace views, and public access to subgroup activity. It demonstrates and develops an object replication approach to integrating synchronous and asynchronous distributed work for a platform incorporating both desktop and large-screen devices. This paper describes an implementation of these concepts with preliminary evaluation data, using timeline-based user interfaces.

Participatory analysis: shared development of requirements from scenarios

Participatory design typically focuses on envisionment and evaluation activities. We explored a method for pushing the participatory activities further “upstream” in the design process, to the initial analysis of requirements. We used a variant of the task-artifact fi-arnework, carrying out a participatory claims analysis during a design workshop fm a project addressing collaborative science education. The analysis used videotaped classroom sessions as source material. The participant-teachers were highly engaged by the analysis process and contributed significantly to the analysis results. We conclude that the method has promise as a technique for evoking self-reflection and analysis in a participatory design setting.