User Experience With Cybercollaboration Technologies

Abstract

A usability survey of various cybercollaboration techologies with 32 questions was created and administered through the Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) Clipboard online survey tool. A total of 73 responses were received and analyzed. There was no participant consensus on what tools to include in “ideal” cybercollaborative environments. The inclusion or exclusion of specific tools and functionality are not critical to team success provided that basic affordances for document and data sharing are provided. Traditional usability issues were not widely cited as the main reason for a virtual team to be unsuccessful. The most critical aspects to ensure virtual team success were general communication and achieving consensus on the hypothesis. Therefore, “usability” in the broad sense of affording the effectiveness of collaboration through virtual environments can be best achieved through providing specific decision frameworks to enable team-wide accountability, participation, and documented acceptance of the hypothesis, as well as specifically addressing critical communication issues. Cybercollaborative technologies should allow for unencumbered interactions and communication between group members so as to not be distracting, while the true affordance of efficient collaborative work comes from setting processes that preemptively improve communication and decision-making where they are most likely to erode.