COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development

1. School of Computing FACULTY OF Engineering COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development Week 8: Lecture 1 2 topics: HCI revisited CSCW – what is it? IS33 HCI /CSCW

2. Social acceptability Utility Usefulness System acceptability Easy to learn Cost USABILITY Practicalacceptability Compatibility Efficient to use Reliability Easy to remember Etc. Few errors Subjectively pleasing System acceptability vs usability(Nielsen, 93) – from VD’s HCI lecture IS33 HCI /CSCW

3. Overview of data gathering techniques (Preece et al., 2002) – VD’s IS33 HCI /CSCW

4. Task description: scenarios – from VD’s HCI lecture • Informative narrative description of human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion of contexts, needs, and requirements • It does not explicitly describe the use of software • Does not use technical language, natural way for describing the task • Produced by stakeholders and analysed by designers Scenarios can be ‘moment-by-moment’, ‘day-in-the life’ or , rather rare, ‘year-in-the-life’ of ….. IS33 HCI /CSCW

5. What is CSCW? • = Computer Supported Cooperative Work • “The generic term covering the application of information technology in support of co-operative work-groups. The individuals in such group use a wide range of computer-based support systems linked by various kinds of communications networks" (DTI/EPSRC 1992). • 2 components - technology + human IS33 HCI /CSCW

6. 4 levels of computer-based group interaction • Informing (no acquaintance) • Co-ordinating (some acquaintance) • Collaborating (working relationship) • Cooperating (goals are common) By Bair quoted in Lubich H P , Towards a CSCW Framework for Scientific Cooperation in Europe, Springer Verlag, 1995 IS33 HCI /CSCW

7. Technology for these group activities • Also known as ‘groupware’ or ‘collaborative tools/technology’ • Any suggestions (learned from IS23)? • Remember the next slide? IS33 HCI /CSCW

8. Applegate's Framework Applegate L, "Technology Support for Cooperative Work: a Framework for Studying Introduction and Assimilation in Organisations" in Journal of Organizational Computing, Vol 1, No 1, 1991 IS33 HCI /CSCW

9. Some examples of groupware • Workflow management software: Wikipedia entry is fairly comprehensive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow_management • Group decision support systems (see BPR paper earlier and GroupSystems: http://www.groupsystems.com/ esp. demo of ThinkTank) • A peer-to-peer system: MS Office Grove (used to be called ‘Groove Workspace’ by Groove Networks) http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/groove/HA101672641033.aspx?pid=CL100604881033 IS33 HCI /CSCW

10. E-science applications For UK, http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/ “e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.” GRID computing is the underlying technology to support the above vision. IS33 HCI /CSCW

11. Web 2.0? • Read a Microsoft white paper “Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise with the 2007 Office System” – at least pp. 1-8 (available in resource page) • Web 2.0 = more user oriented? • See Sharepoint demo http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/demo.mspx People issues? IS33 HCI /CSCW

12. School of Computing FACULTY OF Engineering COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development Week 8: Lecture 2 Domain: CSCW IS33 HCI /CSCW

13. 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 HCI /CSCW

14. 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 HCI /CSCW

15. 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 HCI /CSCW

16. 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 HCI /CSCW

17. A case study on an ‘electronic meeting environment’ • Possible solution: use of shared workspace (MingFang Wu’s MSc research in SOC) • Requirements analysis: • Literature reviewed a study on a typical task-oriented meeting in an engineering environment • (using specially equipped room with cameras to record all the interactions) IS33 HCI /CSCW

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

19. 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 HCI /CSCW

20. 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 HCI /CSCW

21. 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 HCI /CSCW

22. 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 HCI /CSCW

23. 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 HCI /CSCW

24. 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 HCI /CSCW

25. 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 HCI /CSCW

26. My scenario paper: • Lau, Lydia M S. Scenarios are only part of the story?In Ned Kock (ed.) Encyclopedia of E-Collaboration, USA, IGI Global, 2008, pp.547-553. IS33 HCI /CSCW

27. 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 HCI /CSCW

28. 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 HCI /CSCW