Revealing delay in collaborative environments

  • Authors:

  • Carl Gutwin;Steve Benford;Jeff Dyck;Mike Fraser;Ivan Vaghi;Chris Greenhalgh

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada;The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK;University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada;The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK;The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK;The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Delay is an unavoidable reality in collaborative environments. We propose an approach to dealing with delay in which 'decorators' are introduced into the interface. Decorators show the presence, magnitude and effects of delay so that participants can better understand its consequences and adopt their own natural coping strategies. Two experiments with different decorators show that this approach can significantly reduce errors in specific collaborative activities. We conclude that revealing delays is one way in which groupware can benefit from accepting and working with the reality of distributed systems, rather than trying to maintain the illusion of copresent interaction.