Small group design meetings: an analysis of collaboration

  • Authors:

  • Gary M. Olson;Judith S. Olson;Mark R. Carter;Marianne Storrøsten

  • Affiliations:

  • Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI;Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI;Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI;Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

  • Venue:
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

The development of schemes to support group work, whether behavioral methods or new technologies like groupware, should be based on detailed knowledge about how groups work, what they do well, and what they have trouble with. Such data can be used to suggest what kinds of tools people might need as well as to provide a baseline for evaluating the effects of schemes for improvement. We present details of how real groups engage in a representative collaborative task - early software design meetings - to provide such knowledge. We studied 10 design meetings from four projects in two organizations. The meetings were videotaped, transcribed, and then analyzed using a coding scheme that looked at participants' problem solving and the activities they used to coordinate and manage themselves. We also analyzed the structure of their design arguments. We found, to our surprise, that although the meetings differed in how many issues were covered they were strikingly similar in both how people spent their time and in the sequential organization of that activity. Overall, only 40% of the time was spent in direct discussions of design, with many swift transitions between alternative ideas and their evaluation. The groups spent another 30% taking stock of their progress through walkthroughs and summaries. Pure coordination activities consumed about 20 %, and clarification of ideas-a crosscutting classification-took one third of the time, indicating how much time was spent in both orchestrating and sharing expertise among group members. The pattern of transitions revealed these activities were clustered into two general classes - design and management. Although most issues had more than one alternative offered and discussed, there was rarely a wide set discussed, and one third of them were never explicitly evaluated. The results have implications for both the characterization of collaboration itself and for the way in which it might be supported through technology. Finally, the coding schemes developed may be useful for a wide range of problem-solving meetings other than design.