Jennifer Rode, Carolina Johansson, Paul DiGioia, Roberto Silva Filho, Kari Nies, David Nguyen, Jie Ren, Paul Dourish, and David Redmiles: Seeing Further
July 14, 2006 by PingThe authors describe three design principles: dynamic visualization of system activity, integration of configuration and action, and event-based architectures.
The system they studied is Impromptu, a file-sharing system where users can move coloured dots representing their files on a shared pie-shaped area. A sector of the pie belongs to each user, and moving files closer to the center increases the degree of access granted to others.
In the study, participants were asked to collaborate by integrating proposed budgets into a single budget. There were 8 group sessions, each with three participants.
It appeared that sharing and interaction were the primary focus of the users, rather than security. Users believed that because it was a collaboration task, they expected that files they opened from other users would receive live updates as the original copy was edited, which wasn’t the case.
The ability of the subjects to use the interface and their reported satisfaction suggested that integration of configuration and action was successful. Emergence of group norms about sharing suggests that the concreteness and mutual visibility principle was also successful.