Designing a Better Shared Whiteboard: Interruption Recovery, Message Prioritization, and Decluttering

Abstract

Interruptions and situation awareness recovery are important issues for distributed team collaboration tasks such as civil emergency operations. Shared whiteboards effectively convey spatial information, but fail to support interruption recovery because they do not mark or log new annotations and they can become cluttered and difficult to search and parse. Can we develop better support tools, and are there general principles of good design for these tools? St. John, Smallman, and Manes (2007) identified four design principles and applied them to develop a shared whiteboard tool called team-CHEX. The tool logged new messages to a strip below the situation display where they could be noticed without distracting from ongoing tasks and where they could be prioritized for review. Clutter was controlled by only displaying message content when selected by the user. Participants answered situation awareness questions about an on-going team task. Team-CHEX outperformed a chat tool, but performed no better than a typical shared whiteboard design that offered no log or clutter control. The hypothesis tested here was that increasing the clutter on the situation display would interfere with using the whiteboard but not team-CHEX. Accordingly, the “messiness” of the annotations was manipulated without changing the information they contained. The results supported the hypothesis: the messy whiteboard was rated as more difficult to use than team-CHEX, and it was frequently abandoned in favor of reviewing text messages to answer the questions. The implication is that there is a trade-off between the benefits of immediate access to information displayed directly on the situation display and the display clutter that results. Once clutter becomes too great, decluttering becomes an effective support feature.