Design, experiences and user preferences for a web-based awareness tool

  • Authors:
  • Alison Lee;Andreas Girgensohn

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM TJ Watson Research Center, 30 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne NY;FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., 3400 Hillview Avenue, Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue on Awareness and the WWW
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We describe our experiences with the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of a Portholes tool which provides group and collaboration awareness through the Web. The research objective was to explore as to how such a system would improve communication and facilitate a shared understanding among distributed development groups. During the deployment of our Portholes system, we conducted a naturalistic study by soliciting user feedback and evolving the system in response. Many of the initial reactions of potential users indicated that our system projected the wrong image so that we designed a new version that provided explicit cues about being in public and who is looking back to suggest a social rather than information interface. We implemented the new design as a Java applet and evaluated design choices with a preference study. Our experiences with different Portholes versions and user reactions to them provide insights for designing awareness tools beyond Portholes systems. Our approach is for the studies to guide and to provide feedback for the design and technical development of our system.