Making Computer Supported Informal Group Awareness Usable

Problem

People working close by each other tend to be more informally familiar with their surroundings and their colleagues. For example, having lunch in a common area or passing by someone in the hallway provides a person with opportunities to get to know (more of) other people. Sometimes a quick chat may lead to the exchange of work-related information, and most importantly, collaboration among the participants of the conversation.

Unfortunately in the College of Computing, faculty and students are located at three physically separated places: the College of Computing building, the GCATT building, and the Centennial Research Building. Casual encounters among people in different buildings are much lessly to occur. This unfamilarity hinders the progress of many collaborative efforts. So, what should we do to improve the level of awareness and familarity within the College?

The good news is that media space research has begun to design systems that network people at geographically separated locations. The idea is that by providing audio and video information, computers can help simulate casual encounters. The not-so-good news is that those systems have only gained very limited success. Why? This project will introduce you to research in this area.

Here are the steps that you need to carry out to accomplish the project:

1. Participate in a usability study on using video to convey informal awareness information. Contact Alex to set this up.
2. Participate in a simple media space, the electric lounge. Alex will show you this after the usability study.
3. Check out the background reading materials, and experiment with the different privacy-preserving modes available in the electric lounge software.
4. Identify some usability problems in using the system: Do you use it to find people? What makes easy or hard to do so? Does the software provide you with enough information about other people? Is the software distracting when you try to do other work not related to the lounge? etc.
5. Design an alternative interface and/or visualization to solve a specific (and significant) problem in this system. This design should be implementable and affordable in today's computing environment. Draw diagrams and storyboards to illustrate your design.
6. Get familiar with the architecture of the software (get the source code), discuss whether your design can fit into the existing architecture or not. If your answer is yes, what is your implementation plan?

Background Reading

These reading are available from Alex:

• Dourish, P., and Bly, S. Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI'92). May 1992.
• Hudson, S. E., and Smith, I. Techniques for Addressing Fundamental Privacy and Disruption Tradeoffs in Awarness Support Systems. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. November 1996.

Deliverables

A 3 to 5 page report (plus the diagrams and storyboards) describing what you learned about computer supported informal group awareness, your design to solve a specific problem in the electric lounge, and your implementation plan.

Evaluation

You will be evaluated on the quality, effectiveness, thoroughness, and innovativeness of your design/report. Try to make the interface of your design be both useful and usable.