What's Happening in CoC?
- A Design Draft -


Design Focus

The design of the community awareness tool has focused on mostly finding the right combination of screen layout and animations so that the tool uses as little screen space as possible and draws as little attention from the user as possible. These concerns are valid because the tool is aimed at monitoring community events while avoiding getting in the way of users' primary tasks.

However, it is becoming clear that the use of animation in actively attracting attention or passively delivering information is a complicated matter by itself and a theory is expected from a seperate research project. Specifically, people have argued that if the transition time from a displayed article to a new one is very short, the transition may not attract much attention as we thought it would.

More importantly, the ability of being able to directly interact with other people may have a strong influence on whether the tool will be used or not. Therefore, we will focus on the interaction support and leave animations as user-selectable options.

A big challenge is to support the functionalities of news delivery and short chat sessions in a small screen space. We illustrate one possible design in the following scenario.


Scenario

Joe is a graduate student in CoC. Thinking about how to phrase a statement in the document he is editing, he glances over the "What's happening in CoC?" awareness tool and found a picture of an unfamiliar person:

He quickly read over the first few lines of the news article and finds that this is about an invited talk at noon and it seems interesting. Realizing that it's only 5 minutes till the talk starts, he leaves his cubicle to attend the talk.

(an hour later...)

Joe returns to his desk and wonders what is happening in the on-line chat channels. He pushes the "Chat" button and sees a list of channels. The first two channels are flagged, suggesting that they are most likely interesting to him and there are recent activities in those channels. The channel at the bottom of the list looks old and has probably had no activity for some time.

Being a Linux fan and sensing that Linux-related words appear in the second chat channel, Joe decides to watch this channel and see what exactly people are talking about. He clicks on the plus button to expand this channel. Not feeling the urge to add anything to the discussion, he returns to the document he was editing before.


Prototype

The first column of buttons, controls the tool to skip to the previous article , whether cycle through all articles automatically or not , or to skip to the next article .

The second column of buttons, sets the scope of forwarding/backwarding/cycling actions: news , chat channels , or both.

The picture is selected by the tool as the most appropriate to describe the content of the article or chat channel. In the most simplistic approach, it's a picture of the related person in the article or the person who posted the last comment in the chat channel.

If the text area displays a list of items, clicking on the item or the in front of it brings up the details of that item. Clicking on the in the details brings back the list.

If the text area displays a news article, it includes the title of the article in bold face, several lines of details about the article, a link to the full-length article Web page (if one exists), and a link to the chat area. Following the chat link will create a new chat channel if one related to the current news article does not alreay exist.

If the text area displays a chat channel, it shows the content of the chat room with an input area in end of the scrollable region. The number of characters that can be entered is limited by the width of the text entry widget, encouraging short sentences in the chat channel. User can enter special commands in a chat channel to, for example, email the content of the chat channel to oneself, or invite other people to join.

The question mark button on the top-right corner allows access to the help document, application configuration, and advanced features such as setting keywords of interests for filtering news articles and chat channels.


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