I will refrain from listing the talks I attended today, but will share one "short talk" I attended on Collaborative Systems. The presentation was done by Tom Gross, Wido Wirsam, and Wolfgang Graether (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany). They used a few interesting methods to show awareness in a multi-user system by using the concepts of People Maps and Documents Maps.
People Maps used visual ques to show who was online in a particular folder and when, by showing their photos, which gradually reduced in transparency over a 24 hr period, in a linear fashion, horizontally across the screen (timeline). Hovering over a person's image would show submenu text showing what time they were viewing the folder/discussion.
Similarly with Document Maps, a grid-like map showed documents in a folder, where recently edited documents were dark blue while others remained in a light blue state. The prototypes were interesting (myself being a visual person of course). Their most important take-away from the research was the value of "silence." In the sense of "awareness", a silent collaborative area communicates no activity, and reduces the amount of time users spend time browsing for particular documents in a folder. I'll see if I can find more details on this prototype post CHI.
Posted by Amanda at April 9, 2003 03:30 PMWow! Being a "visual" person myself, I found those tools very appealing. The idea of doing a quick visual scan of a "desktop" or some similar environment to judge the level/recency of activity in a collaborative project is really wonderful. I hate to have to click-on/open items to figure out (1) what they contain or (2) why they are there, or (3) where they came from. Is this capability going into any production systems or is it all still pie-in-the-sky?
Posted by: Anne Marie on April 12, 2003 01:06 PMI think Pie-in-the-sky is probably an accurate description. From what I've noticed having attended CHI about every other year since 97 - it takes about 2-4 years to see the ideas there in production in wide-release. That said, I think there will be early opportunities to adopt these technologies sooner rather than later. My hope is that it will be sooner. We'll see!
Posted by: Amanda on April 13, 2003 01:27 PM