CHI '86 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Transparency and awareness in a real-time groupware system
UIST '92 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Portholes: supporting awareness in a distributed work group
CHI '92 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces
CSCW '92 Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
Tcl and the Tk toolkit
Supporting distributed groups with a Montage of lightweight interactions
CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Augmenting the organizational memory: a field study of answer garden
CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Noncollaborative telepresentations come of age
Communications of the ACM
Alternative interfaces for chat
Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Collaborative Support for Informal Information in Collective Memory Systems
Information Systems Frontiers
Activity awareness in family-based healthy living online social networks
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
Ambient interfaces in a web-based theatre of work
EUROMICRO-PDP'02 Proceedings of the 10th Euromicro conference on Parallel, distributed and network-based processing
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A well-known problem with the adoption of groupware systems is that people do not think it's worth participating in them unless a sizable group of people are already doing so. Thus, the lack of a critical mass of users is often a barrier to starting these systems. People will also stop using a groupware-or computer-supported cooperative work system if participation falls below a certain level. This threshold effect can be quite sudden, and it can kill a group- communication system. At the other extreme, people are attracted to systems having considerable activity-the activity itself excites and motivates people. In short, people pay more attention when they know other people are paying attention. We have repeatedly encountered these situations in our own work. Our experiences led us to consider what user-interface mechanisms could provide a motivating sense of social activity. We developed social activity indicators to show how much and what kind of activity is going on in groupware systems. This article describes three types of indicators we have built. As distributed applications, such as concurrent engineering or business-process systems, become even more prevalent, it will be important to consider the interface requirements for making these systems socially usable and useful.