Retrospector: Rapid collaborative reflection to improve collaborative practices

Abstract

Online platforms for freelancing allow teams performing complex work to be assembled in a matter of minutes and dispersed nearly as quickly. With such short time frames, ad hoc and virtual teams have few opportunities to learn strategies and effective team practices to work with their colleagues. Without such practices, teams are prone to work sub-optimally and lack direction. One key challenge in virtual teams discovering effective team practices is that because the practices ought to involve situated knowledge, it takes time to coalesce, as team members learn about each other over time. This work introduces Retrospector, that ad hoc teams can use to reflect collaboratively and reinforce effective team practices. Our interface accelerates the discovery of practices in situ and then guides them in reinforcing and applying these practices to future tasks. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=75) to assess our design with crowdworkers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. This randomized controlled experiment showed that teams using our system for approximately six minutes of collaborative reflection were able to discover effective practices more successfully and had significantly improved team performance and viability. These results indicate that deliberate support for improving team practices can improve outcomes even through very short interaction. We conclude with design implications and opportunities for future work.