People working in physical proximity have access to information about one another. Much of this information is unavailable when people collaborate remotely using groupware. Being aware of other members of a team in a collaborative environment involves knowing both what people are doing and what is happening to the shared information space or artifact. Increasing the amount of information about the group in a computer-mediated system may increase the group's ability to complete the task. This article reports on a study that examined group performance on a task that was computer mediated with and without awareness information. In particular, the study examined how an awareness tool impacts the quality of the work effort and the communications between group members in the completion of a collaborative authoring task. The study found that the use of an awareness tool decreased the quality of the work effort. The number of communications also decreased when the tool was used. Although the results contradict some of the theoretical predictions, an examination of the data suggests theoretical support for a more complex interaction. There was evidence that the awareness tool may have reduced the users' need to communicate and this reduction in communications may have caused the reduction in the quality of the work effort. There is also data to suggest that the existence of the awareness tool may have negatively influenced the effort of some participants, and it was that effort reduction that caused the reduction in the quality of the product.
IntroductionPeople have access to various kinds of information about each other when they are working together. They know whether members of the work group are present or absent. They also have access to information that allows them to infer how actively others are working, what they are working on, who they are working with, and how they "feel" about the project. Consider a team meeting in which group members can note early arrival or tardiness, body posture, tone of voice or changes in tone, lack or presence of eye contact, etc. These verbal and nonverbal cues may be actively used by some and ignored by others. This information and the opportunities to access it are diminished when people collaborate via computer. When people work together, they share a task, one or more artifacts, and a social context. Groupware systems have historically focused on the shared task and artifacts and generally ignored the social context. When the social context has been addressed, it is most often in the form of explicit interactions-two-way video. Little has been done related to the social periphery. Brown and Duguid (1994) propose that being aware of other team members and of the changes in the shared work material are very important in collaborative systems. We call this kind of information peripheral social awareness information and set out to investigate how provision of information of this type might impact some work effort.Hudson and Smith (1996) equate information about the activity of coll...
