In collaborative settings, awareness information is crucial for fostering communication, collaboration and coordination. While in traditional face-to-face scenarios presence and activities of others can be easily detected, e.g. by mimic or gestures, virtual collaborative environments lack this natural awareness of others. In order to compensate for this deficit, "artificial" awareness information has to be added.

It has been emphasized for years in the field of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) and computer supported collaborative leaning (CSCL) that effective communication, collaboration and coordination requires awareness of others. But what kind of awareness information is really needed by the user and how can it be presented in a way that doesn’t distract the user from the primary task? Hence, how is awareness information in Computer-supported collaborative scenarios presented in a user friendly way?

In my PhD thesis, requirements were collected and design principles for presenting awareness information were established in a collaborative learning scenario. A usability study was conducted to reinforce these design principles.
These design principles guide future implementations of groupware systems and provide the basis for usable presentation of awareness information in collaborative environments.

People

Friederike Joedick
Tom Gross, Supervisor
Joerg Hacke, Supervisor

Gratudation

Friederike Joedick gratuated on 11 December 2008

Created by: mirko.fetter last modification: Thursday 27 of January, 2011 [23:20:45 UTC] by tom.gross