COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development

Weeks 8 2008 IS33 HCI /CSCW 1

COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems DevelopmentWeek 8: Lecture 1

2 topics:HCI revisitedCSCW – what is it?

School of ComputingFACULTY OF Engineering

IS33 HCI /CSCW 2Weeks 8 2008

System acceptability vs usability(Nielsen, 93) – from VD’s HCI lecture

Sys

tem

acc

epta

bilit

y

Practicalacceptability

Social acceptability

Etc.

Reliability

Compatibility

Cost

Usefulness

Utility

USABILITY

Easy to learn

Efficient to use

Easy to remember

Few errors

Subjectivelypleasing


Overview of data gathering techniques (Preece et al., 2002) – VD’s


Task description: scenarios – from VD’s HCI lecture

Informative narrative description of human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion of contexts, needs, and requirements

It does not explicitly describe the use of software

Does not use technical language, natural way for describing the task

Produced by stakeholders and analysed by designers

Scenarios can be ‘moment-by-moment’, ‘day-in-the life’ or , rather rare, ‘year-in-the-life’ of …..


What is CSCW?

= Computer Supported Cooperative Work “The generic term covering the

application of information technology in support of co-operative work-groups. The individuals in such group use a wide range of computer-based support systems linked by various kinds of communications networks" (DTI/EPSRC 1992).

2 components - technology + human


4 levels of computer-based group interaction

Informing (no acquaintance) Co-ordinating (some acquaintance) Collaborating (working relationship) Cooperating (goals are common)

By Bair quoted in Lubich H P , Towards a CSCW Framework for Scientific Cooperation in Europe, Springer Verlag, 1995


Technology for these group activities Also known as ‘groupware’ or

‘collaborative tools/technology’ Any suggestions (learned from IS23)? Remember the next slide?


Applegate's Framework

Process

Information

Sharing

Communication

STSP DTSP STDP DTDP

Normative

& restrictive

Customizable

Non-restrictive

degree of

restrictiveness

level

of

support

time and space

Applegate L, "Technology Support for Cooperative Work: a Framework for Studying Introductionand Assimilation in Organisations" in Journal of Organizational Computing, Vol 1, No 1, 1991


Some examples of groupware

Workflow management software: Wikipedia entry is fairly comprehensive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow_management

Group decision support systems (see BPR paper earlier and GroupSystems: http://www.groupsystems.com/ esp. demo of ThinkTank)

A peer-to-peer system: MS Office Grove (used to be called ‘Groove Workspace’ by Groove Networks)http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/groove/HA101672641033.aspx?pid=CL100604881033


E-science applications

For UK, http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/ “e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.”

GRID computing is the underlying technology to support the above vision.


Web 2.0? Read a Microsoft white paper “Bringing Web 2.0

to the Enterprise with the 2007 Office System” – at least pp. 1-8 (available in resource page)

Web 2.0 = more user oriented? See Sharepoint demo

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/demo.mspx

People issues?

Weeks 8 2008 IS33 HCI /CSCW 12

COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems DevelopmentWeek 8: Lecture 2

Domain: CSCW

School of ComputingFACULTY OF Engineering


Borghoff & Schlichter: lessons learned regarding ‘acceptance’

System must be accepted by all team members, but they have different preferences

Group dynamics must be considered (e.g. changing roles, membership, awareness of others)

Failure caused by A disparity between the person doing the work and the

person benefited from it The lack of exception handling (e.g. workflow related)

Difficult to generalise results from evaluative studies

(Borghoff, U.M. & Schlichter, J. H., 2000, “Computer supported cooperative work – introduction to distributed applications”, Springer, Chapter 2.)


Borghoff & Schlichter: 8 challenges for developers of groupware

Disparity between cost and benefit (who has to do the work and who benefits from it)

Critical mass of users Violation of social taboos and challenge to

organisational structure Support for exception handling Complexity of the user interface (trying to do everything) Problems in evaluating and analyzing cscw systems Lack of experience in design of multiuser applications Problems with introducing groupware systems in

organisations.


Toward understanding of team work - distributed cognition Traditional cognitive studies examine

the individual’s interaction with the task/computer

Distributed cognition “encompass interaction between people and with resources and materials in the environment”

Hollan J, Hutchins E & Kirsh D, “Distributed Cognition:Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research” in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium, ed. By John Carroll, ACM Press, 2002.


Distributed cognition - 3 principles1. Cognitive processes are socially distributed

across the members of a group as well as interactions between people and structure in their environments

2. Cognition is embodied – i.e. work materials are more than mere stimuli to individual’s cognitive system, they can become “elements of the cognitive system” (e.g. a blind person’s cane, the computer’s desktop?)

3. Consider the cultural context – culture shapes the cognitive processes of systems that transcend the boundaries of individuals


A case study on an ‘electronic meeting environment’ Possible solution: use of shared workspace

(MingFang Wu’s MSc research in SOC)

Requirements analysis: Literature reviewed a study on a typical task-

oriented meeting in an engineering environment (using specially equipped room with cameras to

record all the interactions)


Requirements in tasks oriented meetings

for example, working on a conceptual design

List Draw Gesture Total

Storeinformation

18% 8% 1% 27%

Expressideas

1% 28% 15% 44%

MediateInteraction

0% 9% 20% 29%

Total 19% 45% 36% 100%

Tang et al (Xerox PARC 1991)


Human Factors in electronic meetings

do we need face-to-face meetings? awareness of the self as a part of a group

activity (on-line and off-line?) shared on-line awareness (WYSIWIS? shared

feedback? in a synchronous multi-user authoring environment?)

Read Mackay W E, Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction, in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ed. By Beaudouin-Lafon) Wiley 1999.


Evaluation of collaborative systems

Possible criteria: Functionalities (specific to context, e.g. for

communications, info sharing or process support in a specific environment)

Public versus private spaces Awareness Role support & others ?

Methods: Use of scenarios + role play Controlled lab sessions Ethnographic techniques


An example of a scenario From http://www.gslis.org/index.php?title=Examples_of_Scenarios

Use and Refinement of a Teaching Aid.

Jane is trying to facilitate more productive discussion in her graduate class. Students are required to annotate electronic copies of the weekly assigned readings. The prototype collects these, and merges them, enabling Jane to project and point to different versions on the 3 large displays in the teaching room, and start discussing why different students had highlighted or commented on different parts of the research paper. The next day Jane meets with the research team to review what happened when she tried out the prototype in class. They review the use log data, trying out different visualizations to help in understanding what worked well, what was awkward to use, or performed poorly, and why. Next they work on how they can improve the design before the next class.


Some examples of human factors evaluation studiesStudy 1. Using self reported logs

Lau et al, Use of Virtual Science Park Resource Rooms to Support Group Work in a Learning Environment, in GROUP'99 conference proceedings, pp 209-218, ACM, 1999.

Study 2. Using scenarios and role playingLau et al, Use of scenario evaluation in preparation for deployment of a collaborative system for knowledge transfer in: 12th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies (WETICE 2003): Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, pp. 148-152 IEEE Computer Society Press. 2003

Study 3.Using scenarios and lab evaluation – an MSc project by Yu-Ting Chiu 2003-04


Study 1: Common Information Space (CIS)

Examined how well the following human issues in CIS were addressed by the system:

importance of shared awareness need to retain some ‘private space’ importance of having ‘protocols for interaction the provision of multi-channel

communications

Findings: see paper for details


Study 2: User & Project Centric System

Examined the ‘match’ between expectation by the designer and that by the users

For the scenario, three episodes were designed, each has an objective to be achieved. Users were asked to find their own way to achieve those objectives.

For this module, it’s the evaluation process that might be of interest…. See paper


Study 3: a systematic way to investigate human factors

See http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/mscproj/reports/0304/chiu.pdf

Scenario: see p.25;

Design of the experiment: see table of contents


My scenario paper:

Lau, Lydia M S. Scenarios are only part of the story? In Ned Kock (ed.) Encyclopedia of E-Collaboration, USA, IGI Global, 2008, pp.547-553.


The main message of these evaluative studies

Need to understand our behaviour better in order to design effective tools for ourselves

Many of today’s groupware have come a long way after iterations of

design/build/evaluation


Research activities tracking Computer Supported Cooperative Work

(CSCW)-The Journal of Collaborative Computing, Kluwer (available via electronic resources)

CSCW conferences (ACM) Paul Dourishhttp://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/index.shtml

Yvonne Rogershttp://mcs.open.ac.uk/yr258/

Documents

COMP3470 IS33 People-Centred Information Systems Development