Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Visualization of user activity has been shown to be imperative to the success of real-time groupware as a tool for coordination activities within a collaboration. While such awareness mechanisms have been studied within the CSCW field for decades, our study contributes by addressing the specific use context of the modern nomad. Modern nomadicity means working and studying through the use of ICTs anytime, anywhere. It also means being connected to a variety of networks during a day while engaged in mediated collaborative activities. In this paper, we are surveying use contexts of the modern nomad and collect data about the network performance in order to aid the design of time-critical awareness mechanisms. The groupware used in this study, described as a relaxed “what you see is what I see” (WYSIWIS)-system, has been developed with the aim of supporting small groups of workers and learners in sharing and collaboratively working with various types of digital objects such as images, videos and texts. We learn in what way common network issues such as high latency, jitter and packet drops impact the usability of time-critical awareness mechanisms such as telepointers and suggest a combination of technology and social processes, making real-time awareness mechanisms more accurately visualize user activity.