COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development

1. School of Computing FACULTY OF Engineering COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development Week 8: Lecture 2 Domain: CSCW IS33 CSCW (cont.)

2. Borghoff & Schlichter: lessons learned regarding ‘acceptance’ • System must be accepted by all team members, but they have different preferences • Group dynamics must be considered (e.g. changing roles, membership, awareness of others) • Failure caused by • A disparity between the person doing the work and the person benefited from it • The lack of exception handling (e.g. workflow related) • Difficult to generalise results from evaluative studies (Borghoff, U.M. & Schlichter, J. H., 2000, “Computer supported cooperative work – introduction to distributed applications”, Springer, Chapter 2.) IS33 CSCW (cont.)

3. Borghoff & Schlichter: 8 challenges for developers of groupware • Disparity between cost and benefit (who has to do the work and who benefits from it) • Critical mass of users • Violation of social taboos and challenge to organisational structure • Support for exception handling • Complexity of the user interface (trying to do everything) • Problems in evaluating and analyzing cscw systems • Lack of experience in design of multiuser applications • Problems with introducing groupware systems in organisations. IS33 CSCW (cont.)

4. Toward understanding of team work - distributed cognition • Traditional cognitive studies examine the individual’s interaction with the task/computer • Distributed cognition “encompass interaction between people and with resources and materials in the environment” Hollan J, Hutchins E & Kirsh D, “Distributed Cognition:Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research” in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium, ed. By John Carroll, ACM Press, 2002. IS33 CSCW (cont.)

5. Distributed cognition - 3 principles • Cognitive processes are socially distributed across the members of a group as well as interactions between people and structure in their environments • Cognition is embodied – i.e. work materials are more than mere stimuli to individual’s cognitive system, they can become “elements of the cognitive system” (e.g. a blind person’s cane, the computer’s desktop?) • Consider the cultural context – culture shapes the cognitive processes of systems that transcend the boundaries of individuals IS33 CSCW (cont.)

6. Case studies in ‘electronic meetings’ There are different types of meetings, here are 2 examples: • Task-oriented meeting in an engineering environment • use of shared workspace (MingFang Wu’s research in SOC) • Distance learning • use of videoconferencing systems (in Roger Hammond, “So you want to communicate effectively?”, Management Services, Nov 1995) IS33 CSCW (cont.)

7. Requirements in tasks oriented meetings • for example, working on a conceptual design Tang et al (Xerox PARC 1991) IS33 CSCW (cont.)

8. can see reactions, body language good for team building best for negotiation - build trusts feels like a real meeting enabled us to share s/w, development and decisions slight delay in hearing and seeing with VC a little noisy expensive VC time the other team can ignore you and talk between themselves not easy to share docs have to meet at the same time Comments on the use of VC + IS33 CSCW (cont.)

9. Human Factors in electronic meetings • do we need face-to-face meetings? • awareness of the self as a part of a group activity (on-line and off-line?) • shared on-line awareness (WYSIWIS? shared feedback? in a synchronous multi-user authoring environment?) Read Mackay W E, Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction, in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ed. By Beaudouin-Lafon) Wiley 1999. IS33 CSCW (cont.)

10. Evaluation of collaborative systems • Possible criteria: • Functionalities (specific to context, e.g. for communications, info sharing or process support in a specific environment) • Public versus private spaces • Awareness • Role support • & others ? • Methods: • Use of scenarios + role play • Controlled lab sessions • Ethnographic techniques IS33 CSCW (cont.)

11. An example of a scenario • From http://www.gslis.org/index.php?title=Examples_of_Scenarios Use and Refinement of a Teaching Aid. Jane is trying to facilitate more productive discussion in her graduate class. Students are required to annotate electronic copies of the weekly assigned readings. The prototype collects these, and merges them, enabling Jane to project and point to different versions on the 3 large displays in the teaching room, and start discussing why different students had highlighted or commented on different parts of the research paper. The next day Jane meets with the research team to review what happened when she tried out the prototype in class. They review the use log data, trying out different visualizations to help in understanding what worked well, what was awkward to use, or performed poorly, and why. Next they work on how they can improve the design before the next class. IS33 CSCW (cont.)

12. Some examples of human factors evaluation studies Study 1. Using self reported logs Lau et al, Use of Virtual Science Park Resource Rooms to Support Group Work in a Learning Environment, in GROUP'99 conference proceedings, pp 209-218, ACM, 1999. Study 2. Using scenarios and role playing Lau et al, Use of scenario evaluation in preparation for deployment of a collaborative system for knowledge transfer in: 12th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies (WETICE 2003): Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, pp. 148-152 IEEE Computer Society Press. 2003 Study 3.Using scenarios and lab evaluation – an MSc project by Yu-Ting Chiu 2003-04 IS33 CSCW (cont.)

13. Study 1: Common Information Space (CIS) Examined how well the following human issues in CIS were addressed by the system: • importance of shared awareness • need to retain some ‘private space’ • importance of having ‘protocols for interaction • the provision of multi-channel communications Findings: see paper for details IS33 CSCW (cont.)

14. Study 2: User & Project Centric System Examined the ‘match’ between expectation by the designer and that by the users For the scenario, three episodes were designed, each has an objective to be achieved. Users were asked to find their own way to achieve those objectives. For this module, it’s the evaluation process that might be of interest…. See paper IS33 CSCW (cont.)

15. Study 3: a systematic way to investigate human factors See http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/mscproj/reports/0304/chiu.pdf Scenario: see p.25; Design of the experiment: see table of contents IS33 CSCW (cont.)

16. The main message of these evaluative studies • Need to understand our behaviour better in order to design effective tools for ourselves Many of today’s groupware have come a long way after iterations of design/build/evaluation IS33 CSCW (cont.)

17. Research activities tracking • Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)-The Journal of Collaborative Computing, Kluwer (available via electronic resources) • CSCW conferences (ACM) • Paul Dourish http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/index.shtml • Yvonne Rogers http://mcs.open.ac.uk/yr258/ IS33 CSCW (cont.)