A Design Framework for Mobile Collaboration

Abstract

Mobile collaboration involves people working together and moving in space. Research in mobile collaboration has primarily focused on technical issues like connectivity support or remote information access. We argue there is a lack of research on many nontechnical issues vital to design mobile collaboration systems, disentangling the relationships between collaboration, work context, and mobility. Our fundamental concern is to go beyond the technical issues towards the assimilation of the mobility dimension in all processes shaping collaborative work, including information sharing, context awareness, decision making, conflict management, learning, etc. This article aims to codify into a design framework: • Some fundamental human factors involved in mobile collaboration. • Several guidelines for developing mobile collaboration systems. The design framework provides general constructs identifying phenomena of interest necessary to inquire about the work context, human activities, and system functionality. The framework identifies what information may interest designers, bounding their relationships with the other stakeholders. The framework also guides the design process, identifying how user requirements may be applied during the implementation phase. The framework has been validated in several real-world design cases. Two cases will be briefly described. This research contributes to the design of mobile collaborative systems. The most significant contributions are related to artifacts and emphasize that designers shall explore the potential of artifacts to support concerted work and sensemaking activities.