A design process for providing awareness information
April 13, 2009
I describe a five stage design process possibly useful for designing information awareness displays.
A design process for providing awareness information
In Design Considerations for Workspace Awareness, I discussed a number important questions that should drive the incorporation of awareness information into a groupware implementation. I’ve reformulated these design considerations as a five stage design process:
Stage 1: Understand the collaboration context.
What is the nature of the goals that will be fulfilled via the system, and what tasks will be performed to achieve those goals? What kind of collaboration will be going on: mostly tightly coupled, mostly loosely coupled, or generally mixed-focus? What is the nature of the group that will use the system? How big is the group, and what kind of people are in it? Do the people in the group know each other outside the system? Are they collocated and thus have face-to-face interaction in addition to that in the workspace, or do they interact solely through the system?
Stage 2: Assess and define awareness information lacks and limitations.
This means identifying which types of awareness (personal, informal, social, group-structural, workspace) should be supported (see Types of Awareness) and what kind of information will be needed by the participants in the collaboration to support those types. Use the context from Stage 1 to drive this assessment.
Stage 3: Assess available and potentially available information sources.
Decide whether they can be transformed into the kind of awareness information that was identified in Stage 2. These information sources should be fed via passive information gathering rather than active solicitation of users’ input (Dourish and Bellotti 1992). Potential sources are those that are not currently available, but could be if we altered our groupware design to gather the relevant information.
Stage 4: Design the awareness display within the workspace to supply the necessary awareness information.
Choose appropriate metaphors to represent the information (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002), and present the awareness information within the shared workspace alongside the shared object, so that users can see the information and object concurrently, and find the information most relevant to the object, and also to make information available as and when needed as a context for individual activities (Dourish and Bellotti 1992).
Stage 5: Implement the design and evaluate the effectiveness of the awareness display.
Conduct empirical studies of the enhancement to evaluate effectiveness. Possibly go back to Stage 1 through several iterations.
References
- P. Dourish and V. Bellotti, “Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces,” in CSCW ‘92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1992, pp. 107-114.
- C. Gutwin and S. Greenberg, “A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 11, pp. 411-446, 2002.
