Focus and Awareness in Groupware

Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (1998)
Focus and Awareness in Groupware. In Video Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - ACM CSCW'98. ACM Press, November 14-18. Video and abstract, duration 7:25.

Abstract: Medium-sized shared workspaces present two design goals to groupware designers: first, people need to focus on the details of their work; second, people need to stay aware of others working
elsewhere in the workspace. This video presents and compares four different visualization techniques for achieving these goals.

The techniques are part of a system for building and editing concept maps, visual languages for
representing ideas and relationships. When people use concept maps, they often need to work in
different parts of the map. Since a groupware workspace can only show a small part of the map at
one time, this means that staying aware can become a problem.

We present four different visual approaches to supporting both detail and awareness. All
approaches extend the earlier versions illustrated in our CSCW '96 videos, and (for ease of
comparison) all work within the concept map editor. The radar view splits the interface into detail
and awareness windows. The fisheye view uses distortion to integrate detail and awareness in a
single window. The dragmag view lets people selectively magnify a portion of a large overview.
The two-level view overlays a full-screen overview onto a detail view.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• HCI
• interactions lab
• GroupLab
• groupware
• visualization techniques
• concept maps
• CSCW