A usability study of awareness widgets in a shared workspace groupware system
CSCW '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
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Real-time groupware systems often let each participant control their own view into a shared workspace. However, when collaborators do not share the same view they lose their awareness about where and how others are interacting with the workspace artifacts. We have designed a number of add-on awareness windows that help people regain this awareness. Two general strategies and several variations are illustrated in this video that extend work done in a few other groupware systems. First, radar overviews shrink the entire workspace to fit within a single window. Awareness is indicated by overlaying the overview with boxes representing others' viewports, by telepointers that show where they are working, and by seeing changes to objects in the workspace as they are made. The workspace can be represented within the radar overview as a scaled miniature, by stylized objects, or by its semantic structure. Second, two types of detailed views show some or all of what another person can see, providing awareness of fine-grained details of others' actions.