Architectural design has an important effect on usability, most notably on temporal properties. This paper investigates software architecture options for mobile user-interfaces, in particular those for collaborative systems. One of the new features of mobile systems as compared with fixed networks is the connection point to the physical network, the point of presence (PoP), which forms an additional location for code and data.This allows architectures that bring computation closer to the users hence reducing feedback and feedthrough delays. A consequence of using PoPs is that code and data have to be mobile within the network leading to potential security problems.
Feedthrough and awareness of user activities are major issues in CSCW. A key difference between awareness and goal-directed feedthrough lies in the required pace and quality of feedthrough. Getting the right pace of feedthrough is important for usability and to avoid overloading networks. Notification mechanisms should therefore allow dynamic tuning of the pace and volume of update events. This matching of the required and supplied pace of update events we call impedance matching. A separable notification server is often ideally placed to perform impedance matching between enduser clients. These design principles have been applied in an experimental notification server Getting-to-Know.
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