Designing multi-user multi-device systems

Abstract

As users get accustomed to an increasing diverse range of mobile devices, personal computers, intelligent home and office appliances, as well as shared public devices, collaborative multi-device systems are emerging to benefit from using together devices of different users and different capabilities. This paper presents a conceptual framework for the systematic design of such systems in symbiotic environments. It distinguishes between information and interaction spaces. Focusing on using devices together, we introduce relationships between interaction spaces and annotatable mappings between the information space and the interaction spaces. Customizable annotations and the corresponding transformation of information support the development of collaborative systems for different scenarios. To demonstrate the validity of our framework, we introduce an architecture for multi-device web-browsing systems, and an annotation vocabulary which particularly focuses on symbiotic environments. The evaluation of our implemented prototype confirms the usefulness of multi-browsing, and the need for supporting both developers and end users to individually annotate web pages.