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

Abstract

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, a glance function, 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. Observations, questionnaires, and interviews indicate that the miniature and radar displays are useful and valuable for tasks involving spatial manipulation of artifacts.

Using an experimental study to develop group awareness support for real-time distributed collaborative writing

“…Due to the inflexibility of strict-WYSIWIS, a large body of work on group awareness has focused on relaxing the strict application of WYSIWIS to accommodate natural interactions in collaboration [31,32,52]. As a result, a looser variation of WYSIWIS has been introduced, namely relaxed-WYSIWIS view sharing.…”

“…This bar moves up and down synchronising with its corresponding owner's movement in the workspace. In the literature, there are two variations of multiuser scrollbars: version 1 described in [31], which has each remote scrollbar located in a separate vertical region (Fig. 3a) and version 2 introduced in [2], which has all remote scrollbars in the same vertical region (Fig.…”

“…As reported by Gutwin et al in their usability study of different awareness widgets [31], multi-user scrollbars make it difficult to interpret the exact positions in the document where other authors are located, what they can see, and what they are doing. This is because the scrollbars only show relative positions of remote authors in the document.…”

“…A radar view renders the entire shared workspace within a miniature overview window on which each user's location of activity is superimposed [29,31,54]. In a miniature view of the shared document, a radar view presents the locations of other users as rectangles (Fig.…”

“…The obtained information is then presented in form of a windows-like interface. Examples of commonly used 2D on-screen awareness mechanisms include WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) [28], telepointers [29][30][31], radar views [31], multi-user scrollbars [2], and fisheye views [11,32,33]. -Audio and video-mediated awareness mechanisms.…”