Designing for collaboration and communication

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Social mechanisms in communication and collaboration

4.3 Technology-mediated social phenomena

4.1 Introduction

Imagine going to school or work each day and sitting in a room alone with no distractions. At first, it might seem blissful. You'd be able to get on with your work. But what if you discovered you had no access to email, phones, the Internet, and other people? On top of that there is nowhere to get coffee. How long would you last? Probably not very long. Humans are inherently social: they live together, work together, learn together, play together, interact and talk with each other, and socialize. It seems only natural, therefore, to develop interactive systems that support and extend these different kinds of sociality.

There are many kinds of sociality and many ways of studying it. In this chapter our focus is on how people communicate and collaborate in their working and everyday lives. We examine how collaborative technologies (also called groupware) have been designed to support and extend communication and collaboration. We also look at the social factors that influence the success or failure of user adoption of such technologies. Finally, we describe the social phenomena that have emerged as a result of the use and appropriation of a diversity of web services, devices, and technologies, including the sharing of photos, the development of virtual friends, and the creation of different forms of social networks.

The main aims of this chapter are to:

• Explain what is meant by communication and collaboration.
• Describe the social mechanisms that are used by people to communicate and collaborate.
• Outline the range of collaborative systems that have been developed to support this kind of social behavior.
• Describe some of the new forms of social behavior that have emerged as a result of the proliferation of mobile devices, web-based services, and applications.

4.2 Social Mechanisms in Communication and Collaboration

A fundamental aspect of everyday life is being social—talking to one other. We continuously update each other about news, changes, and developments on a given project, activity, person, or event. For example, friends and families keep each other posted on what's happening at work, school, at the pub, at the club, next door, in soap operas, and in the news. Similarly, people who work together keep each other informed about their social lives and everyday happenings—as well as what is happening at work, for instance when a project is about to be completed, plans for a new project, problems with meeting deadlines, rumors about closures, and so on.

The kinds of information that are circulated in different social circles are diverse, varying among social groups and across cultures. The frequency with which it is disseminated is also highly variable. It can happen continuously throughout the day, once a day, weekly, or infrequently. The means by which communication happens are also flexible—it can take place via face-to-face conversations, telephone, videophone, instant messaging, texting, email, fax, and letters. Non-verbal communication also plays an important role in augmenting face-to-face conversation, involving the use of facial expressions, back channeling (‘aha’ and ‘umm’), voice intonation, gesturing, and other kinds of body language.

Underlying the various forms of communication are mechanisms and practices that have evolved to enable us to maintain social order. Rules, procedures, and conventions have been established whose function it is to let people know how they should behave in social groups. Below we describe three core forms of social mechanisms that are used, and then show how technological systems have been and can be designed to support these:

• The use of conversational mechanisms to facilitate the flow of talk and help overcome conversational breakdowns.
• The use of coordination mechanisms to allow people to work and interact together.
• The use of awareness mechanisms to find out what is happening, what others are doing, and, conversely, to let others know what is happening.

4.2.1 Conversational Mechanisms

Talking is something that is effortless and comes naturally to most people. And yet holding a conversation is a highly skilled collaborative achievement, having many of the qualities of a musical ensemble. Below we examine what makes up a conversation. We begin by examining what happens at the beginning:

A: Hi there.

B: Hi!

C: Hi.

A: All right?

C: Good. How's it going?

A: Fine, how are you?

C: Good.

B: OK. How's life treating you?

Such mutual greetings are typical. A dialog may then ensue in which the participants take turns asking questions, giving replies, and making statements. Then when one or more of the participants wants to draw the conversation to a close, they do so by using either implicit or explicit cues. An example of an implicit cue is when a participant looks at his watch, signaling indirectly to the other participants that he wants the conversation to draw to a close. The other participants may choose to acknowledge this cue or carry on and ignore it. Either way, the first participant may then offer an explicit signal, by saying, “Well, I must be off now. Got work to do,” or, “Oh dear, look at the time. Must dash. Have to meet someone.” Following the acknowledgment by the other participants of such implicit and explicit signals, the conversation draws to a close, with a farewell ritual. The different participants take turns saying, “Bye,” “Bye then,” “See you,” repeating themselves several times, until they finally separate.

Such conversational mechanisms enable people to coordinate their ‘talk’ with one another, allowing them to know how to start and stop. Throughout a conversation further ‘turn-taking’ rules are followed, enabling people to know when to listen, when it is their cue to speak, and when it is time for them to stop again to allow the others to speak. Sacks et al. (1978)—who are famous for their work on conversation analysis—describe these in terms of three basic rules:

• Rule 1: the current speaker chooses the next speaker by asking an opinion, question, or request.
• Rule 2: another person decides to start speaking.
• Rule 3: the current speaker continues talking.

The rules are assumed to be applied in the above order, so that whenever there is an opportunity for a change of speaker to occur, e.g. someone comes to the end of a sentence, rule 1 is applied. If the listener to whom the question or opinion is addressed does not accept the offer to take the floor, the second rule is applied, and someone else taking part in the conversation may take up the opportunity and offer a view on the matter. If this does not happen then the third rule is applied and the current speaker continues talking. The rules are cycled through recursively until someone speaks again.

To facilitate rule following, people use various ways of indicating how long they are going to talk and on what topic. For example, a speaker might say right at the beginning of their turn in the conversation that he has three things to say. A speaker may also explicitly request a change in speaker by saying, “OK, that's all I want to say on that matter. So, what do you think?” to a listener. More subtle cues to let others know that their turn in the conversation is coming to an end include the lowering or raising of the voice to indicate the end of a question or the use of phrases like, “You know what I mean?” or simply, “OK?” Back channeling (uhhuh, mmm), body orientation, e.g. moving away from or closer to someone, gaze (staring straight at someone or glancing away), and gesture, e.g. raising of arms, are also used in different combinations when talking, to signal to others when someone wants to hand over or take up a turn in the conversation.

Another way in which conversations are coordinated and given coherence is through the use of adjacency pairs (Shegloff and Sacks, 1973). Utterances are assumed to come in pairs in which the first part sets up an expectation of what is to come next and directs the way in which what does come next is heard. For example, A may ask a question to which B responds appropriately:

A: So shall we meet at 8:00?

B: Um, can we make it a bit later, say 8:30?

Sometimes adjacency pairs get embedded in each other, so it may take some time for a person to get a reply to their initial request or statement:

A: So shall we meet at 8:00?

B: Wow, look at him.

A: Yes, what a funny hairdo!

B: Um, can we make it a bit later, say 8:30?

For the most part people are not aware of following conversational mechanisms, and would be hard pressed to articulate how they can carry on a conversation. Furthermore, people don't necessarily abide by the rules all the time. They may interrupt each other or talk over each other, even when the current speaker has clearly indicated a desire to hold the floor for the next two minutes to finish an argument. Alternatively, a listener may not take up a cue from a speaker to answer a question or take over the conversation, but instead continue to say nothing even though the speaker may be making it glaringly obvious it is the listener's turn to say something. Often times a teacher will try to hand over the conversation to a student in a seminar, by staring at her and asking a specific question, only to see the student look at the floor and say nothing. The outcome is an embarrassing silence, followed by either the teacher or another student picking up the conversation again.

Other kinds of breakdowns in conversation arise when someone says something that is ambiguous and the interlocutor misinterprets it to mean something else. In such situations the participants will collaborate to overcome the misunderstanding by using repair mechanisms. Consider the following snippet of conversation between two people:

A: Can you tell me the way to get to the Multiplex Ranger cinema?

B: Yes, you go down here for two blocks and then take a right (pointing to the right), go on till you get to the lights and then it is on the left.

A: Oh, so I go along here for a couple of blocks and then take a right and the cinema is at the lights (pointing ahead of him)?

B: No, you go on this street for a couple of blocks (gesturing more vigorously than before to the street to the right of him while emphasizing the word ‘this’).

A: Ahhhh! I thought you meant that one: so it's this one (pointing in the same direction as the other person).

C: Uh-hum, yes that's right, this one.

Detecting breakdowns in conversation requires the speaker and listener to be attending to what the other says (or does not say). Once they have understood the nature of the failure, they can then go about repairing it. As shown in the above example, when the listener misunderstands what has been communicated, the speaker repeats what she said earlier, using a stronger voice intonation and more exaggerated gestures. This allows the speaker to repair the mistake and be more explicit to the listener, allowing her to understand and follow better what they are saying. Listeners may also signal when they don't understand something or want further clarification by using various tokens, like “Huh?” or “What?” (Schegloff, 1981), together with giving a puzzled look (usually frowning). This is especially the case when the speaker says something that is vague. For example, they might say “I want it” to their partner, without saying what it is they want. The partner may reply using a token or, alternatively, explicitly ask, “What do you mean by it?”

Taking turns also provides opportunities for the listener to initiate repair or request clarification, or for the speaker to detect that there is a problem and to initiate repair. The listener will usually wait for the next turn in the conversation before interrupting the speaker, to give the speaker the chance to clarify what is being said by completing the utterance (Suchman, 1987).

Kinds of Conversations

Conversations can take a variety of forms, such as an argument, a discussion, a debate, a chat, a tête-à-tête, or giving someone a ‘telling off.’ A well-known distinction in conversation types is between formal and informal communication. Formal communication involves assigning certain roles to people and prescribing a priori the types of turns that people are allowed to take in a conversation. For example, at a board meeting, it is decided who is allowed to speak, who speaks when, who manages the turn-taking, and what the participants are allowed to talk about.

In contrast, informal communication is the chat that goes on when people socialize. It also commonly happens when people bump into each other and talk briefly. This can occur in corridors, at the coffee machine, when waiting in line, and walking down the street. Informal conversations include talking about impersonal things such as the weather (a favorite) and the cost of living, or more personal things like how someone is getting on with a new roommate. It also provides an opportunity to pass on gossip, such as who is going out to dinner with whom. In office settings, such chance conversations have been found to serve a number of functions, including coordinating group work, transmitting knowledge about office culture, establishing trust, and general team-building (Kraut et al., 1990). It is also the case that people who are in physical proximity, such as those whose offices or desks are close to one another, engage much more frequently in these kinds of informal chats than those who are in distant corridors or buildings. Most companies and organizations are well aware of this and often try to design their office space so that people who need to work closely together are placed close to one another in the same physical space.

4.2.2 Designing Collaborative Technologies to Support Conversation

As we have seen, ‘talk’ and the way it is managed is integral to coordinating social activities. One of the challenges confronting designers is to consider how the different kinds of communication can be facilitated and supported in settings where there may be obstacles preventing it from happening ‘naturally.’ A central concern has been to develop systems that allow people to communicate with each other when they are in physically different locations and thus not able to communicate in the usual face-to-face manner. In particular, a key issue has been to determine how to allow people to carry on communicating as if they were in the same place, even though they are geographically separated—sometimes many thousands of miles apart. Another challenge has been to design collaborative technologies to help co-located groups communicate and work together more effectively, especially when creating and sharing content.

Communicating in physically different locations. Email, videoconferencing, videophones, computer conferencing, chatrooms, and instant messaging are well-known examples of some of the collaborative technologies that have been developed to support people communicating at a distance. In addition, online MUDs (multi-user role-playing environments) and MOOs (text-based environments that grew out of MUDs, enabling users to construct their own worlds using objects) were originally created to enable people to communicate exclusively using text (see Figure 4.1). The idea was that anyone anywhere who joined the MUD or MOO could take part in a text-based collaborative activity, e.g. playing a game, holding a seminar, or creating a world, by typing their moves and conversations at the prompt. More recently, 3D virtual worlds (also called collaborative virtual environments) have been bolted onto the front end of the text spaces. Instead of typing what they are doing and where they are in a game, narrative, or virtual seminar, players enter and move around virtual rooms and other spaces in the guise of avatars (see Figure 4.1). Advocates of the text-based approach, however, have argued that much is lost with having a graphical representation of the world, since participants no longer have to use their imagination to interpret the text:

Media spaces were also experimented with in the late 1980s and 1990s, combining audio, video, and computer systems to “extend the world of desks, chairs, walls and ceilings” (Harrison et al., 1997). The idea behind their design was that people distributed over space and time would be able to communicate and interact with one another as if they were physically present. An early example was the Xerox Media Space that was designed to support the informal types of communication that occur in hallways and at water coolers, providing opportunities for people in the company, located in different offices, to engage in social chat while at their desks (Mackay, 1999). Other examples included Hydra (see Figure 4.2), Cruiser, and the VideoWindow system (see Box 4.2).

Figure 4.2 The Hydra system: Each ‘hydra’ unit consists of a camera, monitor, and speaker and is meant to act as a surrogate for a person in a different space. The design is intended to preserve the personal space that people have in face-to-face meetings, simulating where they would sit in the physical space if they were physically present (Sellen et al., 1992)

Figure 4.4 The Dynamo system in use at a sixth form college in the UK. The student with the spikey blond hair is showing various media he has created to the girl sitting next to him. Others sitting around the display are drawn into his show and subsequently hold a conversation about it (Brignull et al., 2004)

Communicating in co-located settings. A number of shareable interfaces (see Chapter 6) have been developed to facilitate communication and collaboration among co-located groups, including smartboards, tabletops, and various forms of public displays. One approach has been to situate interactive shared displays in public spaces, e.g. hallways, reception areas, that are intended to encourage people to meet and socialize through posting messages or adding opinions. For example, the Notification Collage system (Greenberg and Rounding, 2001) and the Plasma Posters (Churchill et al., 2003) were originally designed to enable people to send notes, news items, and other materials from the PCs in their offices to a large public display. In contrast, the Dynamo system was designed to enable social groups to readily share and exchange a variety of media on a large shared display by hooking up their memory sticks, laptops, cameras, and other devices, in the vicinity of the display (Izadi et al., 2003). A study of its deployment in a sixth form common room in the UK showed how students often used it as a conversational prop while displaying and manipulating media on the shared display, which in turn led to impromptu conversations between those sitting in the room (Brignull et al., 2004).

Figure 4.5 The Opinionizer interface and a photo of it being used at a book launch party

Computer-mediated communication. Collaborative technologies have been designed to support different kinds of communication, from informal to formal and from one-to-one to many-to-many conversations. Collectively, such technologies are often referred to as computer-mediated communication (CMC). The range of systems that support computer-mediated communication is quite diverse. A summary of the different types is shown in Table 4.1, highlighting how they support, extend, and differ from face-to-face communication. A conventionally accepted classification system of CMC is to categorize them in terms of either synchronous or asynchronous communication. We have also included a third category: systems that support CMC in combination with other collaborative activities, such as meetings, decision-making, and learning. Although some communication technologies are not strictly speaking computer-based, e.g. phones, video-conferencing, we have included these in the classification of CMC, as most now are display-based and interacted with or controlled via an interface.

Table 4.1 Classification of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) Into Three Types: (i) Synchronous Communication, (ii) Asynchronous Communication, and (iii) CMC Combined with Other Activity

(i) Synchronous communication

Where conversations in real time are supported by letting people talk with each other either using their voices or through typing. Both modes seek to support non-verbal communication to varying degrees.

Examples Talking with voice: videophones, videoconferencing (desktop or wall), media spaces, Voice Over IP (VOIP). Talking via typing: text messaging (typing in messages using cell phones), instant messaging (real-time interaction via PCs), chatrooms, MUDs, virtual worlds.

New Kinds of Functionality Virtual worlds allow communication to take place via a combination of graphical representations of self (in the form of an avatar) with a separate chatbox or overlaying speech bubbles. Virtual worlds allow people to represent themselves as virtual characters, taking on new personas, e.g. opposite gender, and expressing themselves in ways not possible in face-to-face settings. Virtual worlds, MUDs, and chatrooms have enabled new forms of conversation mechanisms, such as multi-turn-taking, where a number of people can contribute and keep track of a multi-streaming text-based conversation. Instant messaging allows users to multi-task by holding numerous conversations at once.

Benefits Not having to physically face people may increase shy people's confidence and self-esteem to converse more in ‘virtual’ public. It allows people to keep abreast of the goings-on in an organization without having to move from their office. It enables users to send text and images between people using instant messaging. In offices, instant messaging allows users to fire off quick questions and answers without the time lag of email or phone-tag.

Problems Lack of adequate bandwidth has plagued video communication, resulting in poor-quality images that break up, judder, have shadows, and appear as unnatural images. It is difficult to establish eye contact (normally an integral and subconscious part of face-to-face conversations) in virtual worlds, videoconferencing, and videophones. Having the possibility of hiding behind a persona, a name, or an avatar in a chatroom gives people the opportunity to behave differently. Sometimes this can result in people becoming aggressive, intrusive, and shifting gender.

(ii) Asynchronous communication

Where communication between participants takes place remotely and at different times. It relies not on time-dependent turn-taking but on participants initiating communication and responding to others when they want or are able to do so.

Examples Email, bulletin boards, newsgroups, computer conferencing.

New kinds of functionality Attachments of different sorts (including annotations, images, videos, music) for email and computer conferencing can be sent. Messages can be archived and accessed using various search facilities.

Benefits Can be read at any place and any time. Greater autonomy and control of when and how to respond, so can attend to it in own time rather than having to take a turn in a conversation at a particular cue. Can send the same message to many people. Do not have to interact with person so can be easier to say things than when face-to-face, e.g. announcing sudden death of colleague, providing feedback on someone's performance.

Problems Flaming can take place, where a user writes an angry email expressed in uninhibited language that is much stronger than normal when interacting with the same person face-to-face. This includes the use of impolite statements, exclamation marks, capitalized sentences or words, swearing, and superlatives. Such ‘charged’ communication can lead to misunderstandings and bad feelings among the recipients. Many people experience message overload, receiving numerous emails and junkmail each day. They find it difficult to cope and may overlook an important message while working through their ever-increasing pile of email—especially if they have not read it for a few days. Various interface mechanisms have been designed to help people manage their email better, including filtering, threading, and the use of signaling to indicate the level of importance of a message (which the sender or recipient can make), through color coding, bold font, or exclamation marks placed beside a message. An assumption has evolved that people will read their messages several times a day and reply to them there and then. However, many people have now reverted to treating email more like postal mail, replying when they have the time or inclination to do so.

(iii) CMC combined with other activity

People often talk with each other while carrying out other activities. For example, designing requires people to brainstorm together in meetings, drawing on whiteboards, making notes, and using existing designs. Teaching involves talking with students as well as writing on the board and getting students to solve problems collaboratively. Various meeting and decision support systems have been developed to help people work or learn while talking together.

Examples Customized electronic meeting rooms have been built that support people in face-to-face meetings, via the use of networked workstations, large public displays, and shared software tools, together with various techniques to help decision-making. One of the earliest systems was the University of Arizona's GroupSystem (see Figure 4.6). Different combinations of technologies are beginning to be used to support learning in the classroom and remotely. For example, wireless communication, portable devices, e.g. tablet PCs, and interactive whiteboards are being integrated in classroom settings to allow the teacher and students to learn and communicate with one another in novel interactive ways (see Figure 4.7). More sophisticated and integrated web conferencing tools are also appearing. An example is Macromedia's Breeze, which is a web-based communication system that supports collaborative real-time meetings, instructor-led classes, informational presentations, and e-learning courses.

New kinds of functionality Allows new ways of collaboratively creating and editing content. Supports effective collaborative learning. Integrates different kinds of tools.

Benefits Supports talking while carrying out other activities at the same time, allowing multitasking—which is what happens in face-to-face settings. Greater awareness of other users/learners, enabling each to see how the others are progressing in real time.

Problems It can be difficult to see what other people are referring to when in remote locations, especially if there are multiple documents and different users have different documents on their screens.

Figure 4.6 Schematic diagram of a group meeting room, showing relationship of workstation, whiteboards, and video projector

Figure 4.7 An ACTIVBoard whiteboard running the Floating World game that enables different students to take control of the front-of-the-class display and collaborate during a classroom seminar

Another innovation has been to develop systems that allow people to communicate and interact with each other in ways not possible in the physical world. Rather than try to imitate or facilitate face-to-face communication, designers have developed new kinds of interactions. For example, ClearBoard was developed to enable facial expressions of participants to be made visible to others by using a transparent board that showed their face to the others (Ishii et al., 1993). HyperMirror was designed to provide an environment in which the participants could feel as if they were in the same virtual place even though they were physically in different places (Morikawa and Maesako, 1998). Mirror reflections of people in different places were synthesized and projected onto a single screen, so that they appeared side-by-side in the same virtual space. In this way, the participants could see both themselves and others in the same seamless virtual space. Observations of people using the system showed how quickly they adapted to perceiving themselves and others in this way. For example, participants quickly became sensitized to the importance of virtual personal space, moving out of the way if they perceived they were overlapping someone else on the screen (see Figure 4.9).

Figure 4.8 (a) One of British Telecom's early videophones and (b) a recent mobile ‘visualphone’ developed in Korea

Figure 4.9 Hypermirror in action, showing perception of virtual personal space. (a) A woman is in one room (indicated by the arrow on the screen), (b) while a man and another woman are in the other room chatting to each other. They move apart when they notice they are ‘overlapping’ her and (c) virtual personal space is established

Another innovative system, called BiReality, developed at Hewlett Packard by Jouppi (2002) uses a teleoperated robotic surrogate to visit remote locations as a substitute for physical travel (see Figure 4.10). The goal was to overcome many of the limitations commonly associated with videoconferencing (discussed in Activity 4.5), by giving the remote person more physical presence at the remote location.

Figure 4.10 BiReality: (a) a surrogate robot at a meeting ‘sitting’ between two physically present people, (b) the remote user's view of the meeting while controlling the surrogate, (c) an early version of the surrogate on the move, and (d) a second-generation surrogate designed to preserve the height and sitting/standing posture of the user (Jouppi, 2002)

4.2.3 Coordination Mechanisms

Coordination takes place when a group of people act or interact together to achieve something. For example, consider what is involved in playing a game of basketball. Teams have to work out how to play with each other and to plan a set of tactics that they think will outwit the other team. For the game to proceed both teams need to follow (and sometimes contravene) the rules of the game. An incredible amount of coordination is required within a team and between the competing teams in order to play.

In general, collaborative activities require us to coordinate with each other, whether playing a team game, moving a piano, navigating a ship, working on a large software project, taking orders and serving meals in a restaurant, constructing a bridge, or playing doubles tennis. In particular, we need to figure out how to interact with one another to progress with our various activities. To help us we use a number of coordinating mechanisms. Primarily, these include:

• verbal and non-verbal communication
• schedules, rules, and conventions
• shared external representations.

Verbal and Non-verbal Communication

When people are working closely together they talk to each other, issuing commands and letting others know how they are progressing with their part. For example, when two or more people are collaborating together, as in moving a piano, they shout to each other commands like “Down a bit, left a bit, now straight forward” to coordinate their actions with each other. As in a conversation, nods, shakes, winks, glances, and hand-raising are also used in combination with such coordination ‘talk’ to emphasize and sometimes replace it.

In formal settings, like meetings, explicit structures such as agendas, memos, and minutes are employed to coordinate the activity. Meetings are chaired, with secretaries taking minutes to record what is said and plans of actions agreed upon. Such minutes are subsequently distributed to members to remind them of what was agreed in the meeting and for those responsible to act upon what was agreed.

For time-critical and routinized collaborative activities, especially where it is difficult to hear others because of the physical conditions, gestures are frequently used (radio-controlled communication systems may also be used). Various kinds of hand signals have evolved, with their own set of standardized syntax and semantics. For example, the arm and baton movements of a conductor coordinate the different players in an orchestra, while the arm and baton movements of a ground marshal at an airport signal to a pilot how to bring the plane into its allocated gate.

Schedules, Rules, and Conventions

A common practice in organizations is to use various kinds of schedules to organize the people who are part of it. For example, consider how a university manages to coordinate its people and available resources. A core task is allocating the thousands of lectures and seminars that need to be run each week with the number of rooms available. A schedule has to be devised that allows students to attend the lectures and seminars for their given courses, taking into account numerous rules and constraints. These include:

• A student cannot attend more than one lecture at a given time.
• A professor cannot give more than one lecture or seminar at a given time.
• A room cannot be allocated to more than one seminar or lecture at a given time.
• Only a certain number of students can be placed in a room depending on its size.

Other coordinating mechanisms that are employed by groups working together are rules and conventions. These can be formal or informal. Formal rules, like the compulsory attendance of seminars, writing of monthly reports, and filling in of timesheets, enable organizations to maintain order and keep track of what its members are doing. Conventions, like keeping quiet in a library or removing meal trays after finishing eating in a cafeteria, are a form of courtesy to others.

Shared External Representations

Shared external representations are commonly used to coordinate people. We have already mentioned one example, that of shared calendars that appear on users' monitors as graphical charts, email reminders, and dialog boxes. Other kinds that are commonly used include forms, checklists, and tables. These are presented on public noticeboards or as part of other shared spaces. They can also be attached to documents and folders. They function by providing external information on who is working on what, when, where, when a piece of work is supposed to be finished, and to whom it goes next. For example, a shared table of who has completed the checking of files for a design project (see Figure 4.11) provides the necessary information from which other members of the group can at a glance update their model of that project's progress. Importantly, such external representations can be readily updated by annotating. If a project is going to take longer than planned, this can be indicated on a chart or table by extending the line representing it, allowing others to see the change when they pass by and glance up at the whiteboard.

Shared externalizations allow people to make various inferences about the changes or delays with respect to their effect on their current activities. Accordingly, they may need to reschedule their work and annotate the shared workplan. In so doing, these kinds of coordination mechanisms are considered to be tangible, providing important representations of work and responsibility that can be changed and updated as and when needed.

Figure 4.11 An external representation used to coordinate collaborative work in the form of a printout table showing who has completed the checking of files and who is down to do what

4.2.4 Designing Collaborative Technologies to Support Coordination

Group calendars, electronic schedulers, project management tools, and workflow tools that provide interactive forms of scheduling and planning are some of the main kinds of collaborative technologies that have been developed to support coordination. A specific mechanism that has been implemented is the use of conventions. For example, an early shared workspace system developed in Germany (called POLITeam), that supported email and document sharing to allow politicians to work together at different sites, introduced a range of conventions, such as how folders and files should be organized in the shared workspace. Interestingly, when the system was used in practice, it was found that the conventions were often violated (Mark et al., 1997). For example, one convention that was set up was that users should always type in the code of a file when they were using it. In practice, very few people did this, as pointed out by an administrator: “They don't type in the right code. I must correct them. I must sort the documents into the right archive. And that's annoying.”

The tendency of people not to follow conventions can be due to a number of reasons. If following conventions requires additional work that is extraneous to the users' ongoing work, they may find it gets in the way. They may also perceive the convention as an unnecessary burden and ‘forget’ to follow it all the time. Such ‘productive laziness’ is quite common. A simple analogy to everyday life is forgetting to put the top back on the toothpaste tube: it is a very simple convention to follow and yet we are all guilty sometimes (or even all the time) of not doing this. While such actions may only take a tiny bit of effort, people often don't do them because they perceive them as tedious and unnecessary. However, the consequence of not doing them can be very annoying to others and make the system much less efficient and workable.

When designing coordination mechanisms it is important to consider how socially acceptable they are to people. Failure to do so can result in the users not using the system in the way intended or simply abandoning it. Getting the right balance between human coordination and system coordination is important. Too much system control and the users will rebel; too little control and the system breaks down. Consider the example of file locking, which is a form of concurrency control. This is used by most shared applications, e.g. file-sharing systems to prevent users from clashing when trying to work on the same part of a shared document or file at the same time. With file locking, whenever someone is working on a file or part of it, it becomes inaccessible to others. Information about who is using the file and for how long may be made available to the other users, to show why they can't work on a particular file. When file-locking mechanisms are used in this way, however, they are often considered too rigid as a form of coordination, primarily because they don't let other users negotiate with the first user about when they can have access to the locked file.

A more flexible form of coordination is to include a social policy of floor control. Whenever a user wants to work on a shared document or file, he must initially request ‘the floor.’ If no one else is using the specified section or file at that time, then he is given the floor. That part of the document or file then becomes locked, preventing others from having access to it. If other users want access to the file, they likewise make a request for the floor. The current user is then notified and can then let the requester know how long the file will be in use. If not acceptable, the requester can try to negotiate a time for access to the file. This kind of coordination mechanism, therefore, provides more scope for negotiation between users on how to collaborate, rather than simply receiving a point-blank ‘permission denied’ response from the system when a file is being used by someone else.

4.2.5 Awareness Mechanisms

Awareness involves knowing who is around, what is happening, and who is talking with whom (Dourish and Bly, 1992). For example, when we are at a party, we move around the physical space, observing what is going on and who is talking to whom, eavesdropping on others' conversations and passing on gossip to others. A specific kind of awareness is peripheral awareness. This refers to a person's ability to maintain and constantly update a sense of what is going on in the physical and social context, through keeping an eye on what is happening in the periphery of their vision. This might include noting whether people are in a good or bad mood by the way they are talking, how fast the drink and food is being consumed, who has entered or left the room, how long someone has been absent, and whether the lonely guy in the corner is finally talking to someone—all while we are having a conversation with someone else. The combination of direct observations and peripheral monitoring keeps people informed and updated on what is happening in the world.

Similar ways of becoming aware and keeping aware take place in other contexts, such as a place of study, at work, or school. Importantly, this requires fathoming when it is an appropriate time to interact with others to get and pass information on. Seeing a professor slam the office door signals to students that this is definitely not a good time to ask for an extension on an assignment deadline. Conversely, seeing teachers with beaming faces, chatting openly to other students suggests they are in a good mood and therefore this would be a good time to ask them if it would be all right to miss next week's seminar because of an important family engagement. The knowledge that someone is approachable or not rapidly spreads through a company, school, or other institution. People are very eager to pass on both good and bad news to others and will go out of their way to gossip, loitering in corridors, hanging around at the photocopier and coffee machine ‘spreading the word.’

In addition to monitoring the behavior of others, people will organize their work and physical environment to enable it to be successfully monitored by others. This ranges from the use of subtle cues to more blatant ones. An example of a subtle cue is when someone leaves their dorm or office door slightly ajar to indicate that they can be approached. A more blatant one is the complete closing of their door together with a ‘do not disturb’ notice prominently on it, signaling to everyone that under no circumstances should they be disturbed (see Figure 4.12).

Overhearing and Overseeing

People who work closely together also develop various strategies for coordinating their work, based on an up-to-date awareness of what the others are doing. This is especially so for interdependent tasks, where the outcome of one person's activity is needed for others to be able to carry out their tasks. For example, when putting on a show, the performers will constantly monitor what one another is doing in order to coordinate their performance efficiently.

The metaphorical expression ‘closely-knit teams’ exemplifies this way of collaborating. People become highly skilled in reading and tracking what others are doing and the information they are attending to. A well-known study of this phenomenon is described by Christian Heath and Paul Luff (1992), who looked at how two controllers worked together in a control room in the London Underground. An overriding observation was that the actions of one controller were tied very closely to what the other was doing. One of the controllers was responsible for the movement of trains on the line (controller A), while the other was responsible for providing information to passengers about the current service (controller B). In many instances, it was found that controller B overheard what controller A was doing and saying, and acted accordingly—even though controller A had not said anything explicitly to him. For example, on overhearing controller A discussing a problem with a train driver over the in-cab intercom system, controller B inferred from the ensuing conversation that there was going to be a disruption to the service and so started announcing this to the passengers on the platform before controller A had even finished talking with the train driver. At other times, the two controllers keep a lookout for each other, monitoring the environment for actions and events which they might have not noticed but may be important for them to know about so that they can act appropriately.

Figure 4.12 An external representation used to signal to others a person's availability

4.2.6 Designing Collaborative Technologies to Support Awareness

The various observations about awareness have led system developers to consider how best to provide awareness information for people who need to work together but who are not in the same physical space. Various technologies have been employed, along with the design of specific applications to convey information about what people are doing and the progress of their ongoing work. As mentioned previously, media spaces and audio–video links have been developed to enable remote colleagues to keep in touch with one another. Some of these systems have also been developed to provide awareness information about remote partners, allowing them to find out what one another is doing. One of the earliest systems was Portholes, developed at Xerox PARC research labs (Dourish and Bly, 1992). The system presented regularly-updated digitized video images of people in their offices from a number of different locations (in the USA and UK). These were shown in a matrix display on people's workstations. Clicking on one of the images had the effect of bringing up a dialog box providing further information about that individual, e.g. name, phone number together with a set of lightweight action buttons, e.g. email the person, listen to a prerecorded audio snippet. The system provided changing images of people throughout the day and night in their offices, letting others see at a glance whether they were in their offices, what they were working on, and who was around (see Figure 4.13). Informal evaluation of the set-up suggested that having access to such information led to a shared sense of community.

The emphasis in the design of these early awareness systems was largely on supporting peripheral monitoring, allowing people to see each other and their progress. Dourish and Bellotti (1992) refer to this as shared feedback. More recent distributed awareness systems provide a different kind of awareness information. Rather than place the onus on participants to find out about each other, they have been designed to allow users to notify each other about specific kinds of events. Thus, there is less emphasis on monitoring and being monitored and more on explicitly letting others know about things. Notification mechanisms are also used to provide information about the status of shared objects and the progress of collaborative tasks.

Figure 4.13 A screen dump of Portholes, showing low resolution monochrome images from offices in the US and UK PARC sites

Hence, there has been a shift towards supporting a collective ‘stream of consciousness’ that people can attend to when they want and likewise provide information for whom they want. An example is Elvin, which is a distributed awareness system that provides a range of client services (Segall and Arnold, 1997). It includes Tickertape, a lightweight messaging system, that shows small color-coded messages scrolling from right to left across a user's screen, together with virtual presence windows, indicating who is online or offline and for how long (see Figure 4.14). This and other Internet instant messaging systems provide a number of functions, including a chat and local organizing tool for shared events, e.g. lunch dates, and announcements, e.g. a party, and an ‘always-on’ communication tool for people working together on projects but who are not physically collocated.

In addition to presenting awareness information as streaming text messages, more abstract forms of representation have been used. For example, a communication tool called Babble, developed at IBM by David Smith (Erickson et al., 1999), provides a dynamic visualization of the participants in an ongoing chat-like conversation. A large 2D circle called a cookie is depicted with colored marbles on each user's monitor. Marbles inside the cookie convey those individuals active in the current conversation. Marbles outside the cookie convey users involved in other conversations. The more active a participant is in the conversation, the more the corresponding marble is moved towards the center of the cookie. Conversely, the less engaged a person is in the ongoing conversation, the more the marble moves towards the periphery of the cookie (see Figure 4.15). Similarly, Loops, its successor, uses an abstract dynamic representation to convey the participants' activity in a web-based persistent chat system (Halverson et al., 2003).

Figure 4.14 Sticker tickertape interface, showing ticker scroller and virtual presence window. Sticker is a newer version of Elvin tickertape

Figure 4.15 The Babble interface

4.3 Technology-mediated Social Phenomena

According to the New York Times journalist John Markoff (2005), whenever Catherina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr (the popular photo-sharing service), gets off a plane after a flight she takes a photo of the baggage carousel with her camera phone and sends it to her mother who then views it a few minutes later on the web. This enables her mother to be reassured she has arrived safely. Friends will also take photos using their camera phones to enrich a mutually shared experience, such as a party or concert, where they swap their phones and take pictures of each other and then compare them (Kindberg et al., 2005). Others will send photos taken on their camera phone throughout the day to their family or partner as a form of intimacy.

These examples are indicative of how mobile communication technologies, i.e. cell phones, camera phones, and PDAs, are changing the way millions of people keep in touch, especially the trend towards perpetual communication where day-to-day activities and immediate plans are relayed back and forth—compared with their use of earlier tethered communication technologies. The web has also dramatically changed how people find out about and inform others of events and their news. One of the most significant developments is the proliferation of web-based services that enable people anywhere in the world to share information and content with one another. People are now creating and generating ever-increasing amounts of digital content, e.g. photos, videos, music, news, jokes, games, gossip, information, that web services allow them to easily and freely upload and download to their sites, making it instantly accessible to the rest of the world. As a result, it is now possible for anyone to share and view photos of, say, my nephew and his class on a school trip to Mongolia; read and post up-to-the-minute first-hand accounts of refugees' harrowing experiences in disaster areas; find thousands of recipes on how to make a cheesecake; get recommendations and reviews about the latest movie, hotel, book, restaurant, etc.; find someone who can instantly help them figure out how to get a scrollbar to work on a cell phone using an obscure programming language, and so on. Equally, the same web-based services can enable undesirable views and gossip to be broadcast for all to see; for example, students can ruthlessly criticize a professor and damage his reputation on a public website, e.g. myprofessorsucks.com, while celebrities have become victims of constant surveillance and gossip—their every word, move, and encounter being written about and discussed at length on numerous blogs and news sites.

The social and community web-based services that millions are now using and adapting to share knowledge, views, and personal media include news groups, bulletin boards, buddy lists, blogs, wikis (Internet server programs that allow users to collaborate in the creation of content, such as an online encyclopedia), discussions, and alerts. A number of social network services have also been popularized that enable users to make new friends, find old school chums, keep in touch, and be kept posted of what is happening in their and others' social or business networks, e.g. MySpace or LinkedIn. Online communities have also emerged in every shape and form, from support groups for patients with various illnesses, such as HutchWorld (see Chapter 12), to hobbyists and activists who share common interests, e.g. environmental concerns.

Part of the reason for this phenomenal growth and uptake in the sharing and broadcasting of information, knowledge, and personal content is that many of the web tools have been designed to make it easy for anyone to try them out. Many, too, are freely available. Word of mouth has also greatly accelerated their popularity. But, ultimately, it is about the inherently social nature of human beings; people will always need to collaborate and communicate with one another and the diverse range of applications, web-based services, and technologies that have emerged are enabling them to do so in more extensive and diverse ways.

INTERVIEW: with Abigail Sellen

Abigail Sellen is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Her work involves carrying out user studies to inform the development of future products. She has a background in cognitive science and human factors engineering, having obtained her doctorate at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to this Abigail worked at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, UK, Xerox Research Labs in Cambridge, UK, and Apple Computer in Cupertino, California. She has also worked as an academic researcher at the Computer Systems Research Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada and the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK. She has written widely on the social and cognitive aspects of paper use, videoconferencing, input devices, human memory, and human error, all with an eye to the design of new technologies.

YR: Could you tell me what you do at Microsoft Research Cambridge?

AS: Sure, I'm in a group at Microsoft Research called ‘Computer-Mediated Living’ which brings together psychologists, sociologists, computer scientists, hardware engineers and designers. Our goal is to inform the development of new technologies that fit into and enhance everyday life, but that also go beyond the usual metaphors for software and hardware design. You could say that we are trying to go beyond the desktop metaphor to bring technology out of that box and into the everyday world around us. Our focus at the moment is on the home, and on supporting activities related to home (whether these occur at work or on the move).

YR: Right. Could you tell me about user studies, what they are and why you consider them important?

AS: OK. User studies essentially involve looking at how people behave either in their natural habitats or in the laboratory, both with existing technologies and with new ones. I think there are many different questions that these kinds of studies can help you answer. Let me name a few. One question is: who is going to be the potential user for a particular device or service that you are thinking of developing? A second question—which I think is key—is, what is the potential value of a particular product for a user? Once we know this, we can then ask, for a particular situation or task, what features do we want to deliver and how best should we deliver those features? This includes, for example, what would the interface look like? Finally, I think user studies are important to understand how users' lives may change and how they will be affected by introducing a new technology. This has to take into account the social, physical, and technological context into which it will be introduced.

YR: So it sounds like you have a set of general questions you have in mind when you do a user study. Could you now describe how you would do a user study and what kinds of things you would be looking for?

AS: Well, I think there are two different classes of user studies and both are quite different in the ways you go about them. There are evaluation studies, where we take a concept, a prototype or even a developed technology and look at how it is used and then try to modify or improve it based on what we find. The second class of user studies is more about discovering what people's unmet needs may be. This means trying to develop new concepts and ideas for things that people may never have thought of before. This is difficult because you can't necessarily just ask people what they would like or what they would use. Instead, you have to make inferences from studying people in different situations and try to understand from this what they might value.

YR: In the book we mention the importance of taking into account social aspects, such as awareness of others, how people communicate with each other and so on. Do you think these issues are important when you are doing these two kinds of user studies?

AS: Well, yes, and in particular I think social aspects really are playing to that second class of user study I mentioned where you are trying to discover what people's unmet needs or requirements may be. Here you are trying to get rich descriptions about what people do in the context of their everyday lives—whether this is in their working lives, their home lives, or lives on the move. I'd say getting the social aspects understood is often very important in trying to understand what value new products and services might bring to people's day-to-day activities, and also how they would fit into those existing activities.

YR: And what about cognitive aspects, such as how people carry out their tasks, what they remember, what they are bad at remembering? Is that also important to look into when you are doing these kinds of studies?

AS: Yes, if you think about evaluation studies, then cognitive aspects are extremely important. Looking at cognitive aspects can help you understand the nature of the user interaction, in particular what processes are going on in their heads. This includes issues like learning how users perceive a device and how they form a mental model of how something works. Cognitive issues are especially important to consider when we want to contrast one device with another or think about new and better ways in which we might design an interface.

YR: I wonder if you could describe to me briefly research where you have looked at both cognitive and social aspects.

AS: A good example is a study we did aimed at designing and developing new devices for reading digital documents in workplace settings. When we first set out on this study, before we could begin to think about how to build such devices, we had to begin by asking, “What do we mean by reading?” It turned out there was not a lot written about the different ways people read in their day-to-day lives. So the first thing we did was a very broad study looking at how people read in work situations. The technique we used here was a combination of asking people to fill out a diary about their reading activities during the course of a day and interviewing them at the end of each day. The interviews were based around what was written in the diaries, which turned out to be a good way of unpacking more details about what people had been doing.

That initial study allowed us to categorize all the different ways people were reading. What we found out is that actually you can't talk about reading in a generic sense but that it falls into at least 10 different categories. For example, sometimes people skim read, sometimes they read for the purpose of writing something, and sometimes they read very reflectively and deeply, marking up their documents as they go. What quickly emerged from this first study was that if you're designing a device for reading it might look very different depending on the kind of reading the users are doing. So, for example, if they're reading by themselves, the screen size and viewing angle may not be as important as if they're reading with others. If they're skim reading, the ability to quickly flick through pages is important. And if they're reading and writing, then this points to the need for a pen-based interface. All of these issues become important design considerations.

This study then led to the development of some design concepts and ideas for new kinds of reading devices. At this stage we involved designers to develop different ‘props’ to get feedback and reactions from potential users. A prop could be anything from a quick sketch to an animation to a styrofoam 3D mockup. Once you have this initial design work, you can then begin to develop working prototypes and test them with realistic tasks in both laboratory and natural settings. Some of this work we have already completed, but the project has had an impact on several different research and development efforts.

YR: Would you say that user studies are going to become an increasingly important part of the interaction design process, especially as new technologies like ubiquitous computing and handheld devices come into being—and where no one really knows what applications to develop?

AS: Yes. I think the main contribution of user studies, say, 15 years ago was in the area of evaluation and usability testing in laboratory settings. One change is that with the advent of mobile and ubiquitous computing, fewer of these technologies can be evaluated or understood in such controlled circumstances. By their very nature they must be useful in many different environments with much more complexity than is present in a laboratory. Our evaluation methods therefore have to adapt too and be oriented more toward evaluation in real world settings and everyday activities. Here we can learn a lot from the methods of sociologists and anthropologists. I think also the role of user studies is shifting from an emphasis on evaluation to more of an emphasis on the invention and development of new product concepts. One of the implications of this is the need to work more closely with people who know how to do design. I think we have a lot to learn from designers and their techniques. The bottom line is drawing on other disciplines is more important than ever for a user studies researcher.

YR: So they are essentially working as a multidisciplinary team. Finally, what is it like to work in a large organization like Microsoft, with so many different departments?

AS: One thing about working for a large organization is that you get a lot of variety in what you can do. I have found that as part of the research laboratory of such an organisation, I get a fair amount of choice in what I do and don't have to be tied to a particular product for any long period of time. If, on the other hand, you work for a smaller organization such as a start-up company, inevitably there is lots of pressure to get things out the door quickly. Things are often very focused so there's less time to spend looking at any one issue deeply. I prefer the flexibility of a large organisation, and, while it may sometimes be more of a challenge, there is still the satisfaction of impacting real products from time to time.