Groupware Usability Research Articles

Team usability testing: development and validation of a groupware usability evaluation method

As virtual teamwork became widespread, the importance of the usability of groupware has increased, as groupware must have high usability in order to properly support teamwork. Several studies have focused on the usability evaluation of groupware, yet, both in terms of science and practice, there is a lack of a method that, like existing empirical single-user methods, can be routinely applied in software development practice. The new Team Usability Testing method differs from previous methods in that it is an empirical method for evaluating synchronous (real-time) collaborative software that explores the team usability problems with the help of real or potential users. The method consists of questionnaires, screen recording videos and group interviews, and the framework of data processing is based on the theory of the mechanics of collaboration. In the four steps of the development of the method, empirical studies under laboratory conditions and real working conditions, and then, for validation purposes, analytical, heuristic evaluation with the involvement of usability experts were performed. During the development and the application of the method, the communication patterns of different teams were examined in terms of their relationship to software usability. In this paper we present the results of the second laboratory study and the heuristic evaluation in details. Overall, the method is able to explore team usability problems of different types of teams, making it a valuable element in existing methods for evaluating the usability of groupware.

A Usability Study of an Educational Groupware System: Supporting Awareness for Collaboration

A number of research studies have focused on the usability of groupware in supporting collaborative work. Unfortunately, our understanding of their impact on collaborative learning is still limited due to a lack of attention on this issue. The majority of educators and designers in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) expect interactions and collaborations to come naturally. As a result, they are focused on providing a wide variety of interaction opportunities for both learners and educators through producing versatile tools in educational groupware systems, but they ignore the most important factor—whether these features are valuable at all. To bridge this gap, in this article, we describe our experiences with a loosely-coupled collaborative software called GroupScribbles, and explore its potential and challenges in supporting cooperation and coordination among learners. Our study suggests versatility is not of singular importance in an educational groupware tool. Rather, how it can provide a seamless and focused distributed learning environment determines the overall pedagogical appropriateness of the software in CSCL. The learning environment, although distributed and fragmented, should be capable of linking learners, their activities and their meta-cognitive problem solving skills cohesively so as to continuously construct a relatively compact learning space where coordination and collaboration can be effective and efficient.

Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Groupware: Evaluating Two Audience Response Systems

In conferences, congresses and symposia, there are issues that may be handled by applications running in mobile devices. In these environments, Audience Response Systems can be used to increase iteration between participants. This paper aims to evaluate the usability of two Audience Response Systems, namely Simple Question and Voting, developed for collaborative proposals. We employed a set of 15 heuristics for mobile groupware evaluation, which includes three fundamental aspects of mobile groupware applications: HCI, mobilit y, and collabo ration. In the evaluation performed in this work, three specialists used the heuristics to evaluate both systems interfaces. The evaluation was conducted in three steps: (i) exploration of the system and its features; (ii) usability evaluation; (iii) consolidation of the collected data and reflection. The evaluation results of Simple Question and Voting indicated than both are in accordance with some usability aspects. However, we also identified common problems, such as non-appropriate communication methods, low coordination, and group management. Based on the results and experiences obtained over this evaluation, we argue that the heuristic set presented is applicable to evaluate mobile groupware usability. Keywords: heuristic evaluation, mobile groupware, usability.

The MAUI Toolkit: Groupware Widgets for Group Awareness

Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the Multi-User Awareness UI toolkit (MAUI) toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.

Task analysis for groupware usability evaluation

Researchers in Computer Supported Cooperative Work have recently developed discount evaluation methods for shared-workspace groupware. Most discount methods rely on some understanding of the context in which the groupware systems will be used, which means that evaluators need to model the tasks that groups will perform. However, existing task analysis schemes are not well suited to the needs of groupware evaluation: they either do not deal with collaboration issues, do not use an appropriate level of analysis for concrete assessment of usability in interfaces, or do not adequately represent the variability inherent in group work. To fill this gap, we have developed a new modeling technique called Collaboration Usability Analysis. CUA focuses on the teamwork that goes on in a group task rather than the taskwork. To enable closer links between the task representation and the groupware interface, CUA grounds each collaborative action in a set of group work primitives called the mechanics of collaboration . To represent the range of ways that a group task can be carried out, CUA allows variable paths through the execution of a task, and allows alternate paths and optional tasks to be modeled. CUA's main contribution is to provide evaluators with a framework in which they can simulate the realistic use of a groupware system and identify usability problems that are caused by the groupware interface.

Awareness support in a groupware widget toolkit[29] (abstract only)

Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the MAUI toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.

A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called i>workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces – tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware.

Adapting the Locales Framework for Heuristic Evaluation of Groupware

Heuristic evaluation is a rapid, cheap and effective way for identifying usability problems in single user systems. However, current heuristics do not provide guidance for discovering problems specific to groupware usability. In this paper, we take the Locales Framework and restate it as heuristics appropriate for evaluating groupware. These are: 1) Provide locales; 2) Provide awareness within locales; 3) Allow individual views; 4) Allow people to manage and stay aware of their evolving interactions; and 5) Provide a way to organize and relate locales to one another. To see if these new heuristics are useful in practice, we used them to inspect the interface of Teamwave Workplace, a commercial groupware product. We were successful in identifying the strengths of Teamwave as well as both major and minor interface problems.