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International Journal of Information Management 33 (2013) 401– 407

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

International Journal of Information Management

j our nal ho me p age: www.elsev ier .com/ locate / i j in fomgt

se of widgets as information management tools in online shared spaces

inara Saparova ∗, Francis Kibaru, Josipa Basicniversity of Missouri – School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, 111 London Hall, Columbia, MO 65201, USA

r t i c l e i n f o

rticle history:vailable online 8 January 2013

eywords:nline shared spaceswareness

nformation management

a b s t r a c t

Online shared spaces are destinations where people of common interests interact to achieve commongoals or borrow each other’s expertise for personal pursuits. Due to a multitude of users, such spacesgenerate large amounts of content, thus creating a potential for information overload. To deal with it,users of online shared spaces develop information management strategies that frequently involve theuse of information technology. In this paper we present a case study of the use of widgets as informationmanagement tools in uCern, an online shared workspace where healthcare industry stakeholders getinvolved in various types of interactions. To understand how widgets served the purpose of informa-tion management and whether they were considered useful, we administered an online questionnaire

(n = 183) followed by qualitative interviews (n = 5). Data analysis revealed that study participants usedwidgets as tools that promoted their situation and activity awareness of events and activities going on inuCern and helped them with organizing and accessing the content in a quick and efficient manner. Wealso describe issues associated with the use of widgets and their usefulness as reported by participantsand propose implications for design and development of online shared spaces in relation to informationmanagement tools.

. Introduction

In recent years, a lot of attention has been drawn to the poten-ial application of online collaborative spaces in the workplace forork related tasks, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation

Paroutis & Al Saleh, 2009; Schneckenberg, 2009). These spacesake it possible for groups of people to collaborate with others,orking from different locations, departments, or even companies

Nomura, Hayashi, Hazama, & Gudmundson, 1998). In addition,eople using online shared workspaces are able to collaborate byarrying out joint work on tasks, simplifying communication abouthared artifacts, coordinating activity through visual means, andaintaining awareness of others (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992; Gutwin

t al., 2008; Nomura et al., 1998).People share online spaces not only as organized groups work-

ng towards obvious goals but also as individuals or groups thatre not necessarily organized in a particular way (Sumi & Mase,002). Sumi and Mase (2002) differentiated between groupware,hich consisted of organized groups of people with shared goals

uch as collaborative work, and communityware where individualsnd unstructured groups in different localities form online commu-ities that do not necessarily share common goals, but engage in

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 573 884 2737, fax: +1 573 884 5158.E-mail addresses: ds754@mail.missouri.edu (D. Saparova),

k4k3@mail.missouri.edu (F. Kibaru), jbyv7@mail.missouri.edu (J. Basic).

268-4012/$ – see front matter. Published by Elsevier Ltd.ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2012.12.001

Published by Elsevier Ltd.

social activities and share knowledge, interests, and preferences.It is important to note that both groupware and communityware,though different in their objectives, benefits, and tasks, allow theirmembers to benefit from each other through sharing. In group-ware, organized groups of people share skills, tasks, activities,and generally collaborate to accomplish common goals; while incommunityware, people who are not necessarily organized shareinformation and knowledge to satisfy common interests (Sumi &Mase, 2002). In order to ensure that members in each type of sharedspace achieve objectives, there is a need for them to be aware of theimportant elements that are shared.

Gutwin and Greenberg (1997) defined awareness as informed-ness or knowledge that needs to be maintained/supported andis used as a basis for something else. Awareness exists in varia-tions, for example, workplace, availability, group, and contextualawareness (Christiansen & Maglughlin, 2003); shared workspaceawareness (Ganoe et al., 2003); and activity awareness (Nomuraet al., 1998). The latter (i.e., activity awareness) is particularlyimportant in groupware as group or team members need to stayaware of each other’s activities, outcomes of those activities, andfuture activities in order to efficiently collaborate (Ganoe et al.,2003; Gutwin & Greenberg, 2004).

According to Gutwin and Greenberg (2004), people collaborat-

ing on a shared workspace (groupware) want to have informationon the changes taking place in this dynamic environment not justfor knowledge sake, but in order to accomplish set collaborationobjectives. Therefore, if shared workspaces are designed to support

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orkspace awareness, they help users “to sustain effective teamognition” (p. 1), which leads to better team performance as a resultf reduced effort, increased efficiency, and reduction in errors.arroll, Rosson, Convertino and Ganoe (2006) seconded Gutwinnd Greenberg’s opinion and pointed that embedded awarenessubsystems should enable collaborators to ‘become aware’ with asittle effort as possible, leaving them to concentrate on tasks thatirectly relate to attainment of goals of collaboration.

In a groupware or communityware serving hundreds or evenhousands of users a lot of information can potentially be gener-ted beyond individual user’s capacity to process and manage itfficiently. Consequently, large amounts of information may lead tohe creation of the information load encountered by users inside aroupware or a communityware and result in a significant informa-ion overload (see examples of context and studies on informationverload in Eppler and Mengis (2004)). In situations where usersight require this information for effective performance on tasks,

uch overload might result in stress and poor decision-makingEppler & Mengis, 2004). Furthermore, a groupware or a communi-yware being examples of the Web content platforms can containnformation that is heavily distributed or scattered throughouthese environments. Such distribution of information make it diffi-ult to be found, especially by novice users who have not developedearch strategies or are lacking experience ploughing through thecattered information (Bhavnani & Peck, 2010). Issues like that mayesult in inefficient management of information and negativelyffect the productivity of knowledge workers who are using group-are or communityware for work related purposes (Simperl et al.,

010).In order to effectively support individual capacity to process,

anage, and convert significant amounts of information into usefulnowledge, strategies for retrieval, filtering, evaluation, contex-ualization, and explanation need to be implemented (Memmi,012). In these roles, information management can be maintainedhrough both personal strategies and embedded technical sup-ort. Despite this commonality, technical tools are only availableo handle information retrieval and filtering, while informationvaluation, contextualization and explanation can only be handledanually (Memmi, 2012). In this paper, we investigated the use

f technical tools, particularly widgets, as a strategy for retriev-ng and filtering information. Widgets, being software componentshat can be embedded in an application, allow users to collectnformation related to other users, objects, and spaces within thepplication and, thus, promote awareness. In order for widgets toe useful as tools of raising awareness among members of a sharedorkspace, they need to be usable. According to Gutwin, Roseman,

nd Greenberg (1996), awareness widgets should be easily under-tandable, easy to use, provide information expected by users, andresent no distraction of users from their tasks.

. Context and purpose of study

Here we present a case study that aimed to investigate the usef widgets within an online shared space. We were interested inhe user perceptions of usefulness of widgets and their efficiencys tools for retrieving and filtering information. Particularly, thetudy aimed to answer the following research questions:

1) Which awareness widgets did the users of the online sharedspace choose and why?

2) What issues did the users of the online shared space encounter

when using awareness widgets?

s a context for the study we chose uCern. It is described as a social-etworking, collaborative platform, where employees, clients, and

Fig. 1. Activity awareness model (Neale et al., 2004).

associates of Cerner Corporation share their thoughts and ideas. It isalso a place where uCern users make connections with peers acrossthe healthcare industry. uCern being an online shared space can beviewed as a combination between groupware and communityware.Some of the uCern users are people who work on similar projects,share common goals and objectives, and are both co-located andgeographically dispersed. Others are people who do not know abouteach other but may have unrecognized needs in expertise of eachother. As a result, they spend time in uCern looking for other userswho share similar interests or content of interest to them. uCernbeing a platform available on the Web may also be considered asa virtual institution for social interactions among its users. In thisrole uCern is endowed with a number of characteristics relevantto virtual institutions. As named by Memmi (2012), they includea virtual context, internal norms and rules, collaborative perfor-mance on tasks with massive contributions from self-organizedusers, quick reaction time, and users volunteering their time, effort,and expertise.

3. Methodology

3.1. Participants

A convenient sample of survey takers included people of differ-ent age, different job roles, and varying experiences using uCern.Out of 183 uCern users who were invited to take an online survey,87 provided responses (47.5% response rate).

3.2. Instruments

We created a survey questionnaire that aimed to reveal thepatterns and peculiarities of uCern widgets utilization by studyparticipants. The majority of questions were based on the activ-ity awareness evaluation model by Neale, Carroll, & Rosson, 2004(Fig. 1) and inquired about the importance of certain aspects ofawareness. It also included questions that asked about partici-pants’ demographics, duration and frequency of uCern use, jobroles, whether they had uCern views customized, their ideas aboutthe importance of activity awareness for information management,

and usefulness and meaningfulness of uCern widgets. The ques-tionnaire was created with the help of Qualtrics Survey Softwareand included a combination of multiple-choice and open-endedquestions (Appendix A).

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To obtain more detailed feedback, we conducted follow-upualitative interviews with six uCern users. During interviewsarticipants could elaborate on whether widgets were helpful inavigating through large amounts of information on uCern andhether they experienced any usability problems. A number of

tudies found that five test subjects are usually enough to revealhe majority of usability problems in a system (Gilbert, Williams, &eals, 2007; Nielsen, 2000).

.3. Procedures

Before data collection, the Institutional Review Board approvedhe study. The link to the survey questionnaire was distributed toCern users via e-mail with the permission of the Cerner executives.ata from the survey was analyzed by using descriptive statisticss well as thematic analysis of the open-ended questions. Inter-iews were conducted with those participants who volunteered torovide their feedback. With the permission of interviewees, allhe interviews were recorded. Interview data was transcribed andpen coded for identification of general recurrent themes.

. Results

.1. Demographic information

From 87 people who started the survey 59 reported having theirCern views customized, 26 reported not having their uCern viewsustomized, and 2 abandoned the survey immediately. Becausesers were not required to answer questions, their answer choiceas selective and frequently resulted in a different number of total

nswers per question.Among those who answered the question about gender were 27

omen and 28 men. The majority of survey takers were in the ageroup of 20–30 years old, followed by people in the age group of1–40 years old, 41–50 years old, and 51 years old and older. By theime of the data collection, the majority of these people had usedCern for more than a year on a daily basis to stay aware of activi-ies related to their work projects. The sample included 12 project

anagers, 4 integration architects, 4 designers, 2 software engi-eers, 2 contributors, 2 content creators, 2 engagement leaders, 2ommunication specialists, and other professionals, like a technicalnalyst, consultant, facilitator, etc.

The sample of interview participants included 2 women and 3en with three people in the age group of 30–40 and the other two

n the age group of 20–30. All five had used uCern for more than aear every day or several times a week for work related purposesy the time of data collection. Two project managers, one solutionesigner, one strategist, and one software engineer represented theample.

During the time of the study, uCern offered 41 awarenessidgets that were grouped into four categories (Fig. 2). Content cat-

gory had 21 widgets linked to popular discussions, recent content,opular blog posts, tasks, and documents; Places involved projects,roups, and other spaces that a user could belong to; People pro-ided options such as watching another user, recent activity, andtatus updates; Other provided features for individual user inter-sts such as weather, clock, Google calendar, bookmarks, and RSSubscriptions.

.2. Research question 1: choice of awareness widgets andeasons for choosing them

Participants reported using uCern for various reasons. And yet,he primary reasons included (1) promoting and supporting aware-ess regarding different work related aspects; (2) involvement in

mation Management 33 (2013) 401– 407 403

collaboration; and (3) find and sharing information that could helppromote knowledge and find solutions to work-related problems.

Total number of awareness widgets that participants reportedusing by the time of the study was 33 out of the available 41 options.In decreasing order of occurrence, the awareness widget optionswere represented by the following (number of participants whoselected the option is shown in parenthesis):

• Activity widgets (24), including three types of widgets:◦ Community activity (12)◦ Recent activity (7)◦ Connection activity (5)

• Blog post widgets (17), including two types of widgets:◦ Popular blog posts (11)◦ Recent blog posts (6)

• Popular discussions (14)• Content (14) including four types of widgets:

◦ Recent content (8)◦ Top Linked content (3)◦ Your content (2)◦ Featured content (1)

• Bookmarks (13) including two widgets:◦ Your bookmark (9)◦ Recent bookmark (4)

• Places (13)• Your Groups (12)• Watch user (9)• Your projects (8)• Formatted text (7)• Spaces (5)• Weather (4)

Asked why they chose these widgets, participants gave reasonsthat could generally be grouped into five categories: situationawareness, team and group awareness, information sharing, orga-nization and ease of access to content, and utilitarian use of widgets.In some instances the same widgets were used for various rea-sons, thus, were associated with several categories. An exampleof an uCern view customized with the help of widgets is shown inFig. 3.

4.2.1. Situation awarenessSome participants reported that busy schedules and access to

too much work-related information on a daily basis created theneed for them to stay aware of current news, events, and latest dis-cussions taking place in uCern. For this purpose they used “Recent”and “Popular” widgets and widgets like Community Activity, TopLinked Content, and Bookmarks. Participants were of the opinion thatthese awareness widgets were instrumental in keeping them awareof activities within uCern, even though in some cases the informa-tion they were getting through them was not directly related towork the participants were involved in.

“These [widgets like Your Groups, Your Bookmarks, Popular BlogPosts, Popular Discussions, Recent Activity, Community Activity]seemed to be the best widgets I could use that would give me thebest overview of the information I’d like to know about.”“The popular discussions and blog posts widgets give me a pulse ofwhat’s going on organization-wide.”“By Bookmarking documents that are central to a project, I can stayup to date when they documents has been updated or commentedon.”

4.2.2. Team and group awarenessThe majority of participants who answered this ques-

tion reported using uCern for projects they were currently

404 D. Saparova et al. / International Journal of Information Management 33 (2013) 401– 407

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Fig. 2. uCer

orking on. Participants also noted that in addition to keepinghem generally aware about activities in the work environ-

ent, widgets helped them track activities of team members andeam leaders. Of all participants who were involved in at leastne project on uCern, about three quarters were of the viewhat staying aware of activities of other team members work-ng on the same projects as themselves was very important to

heir work. To obtain access to information related to the groupr team activity, participants reported using widgets like Yourroups, Your Projects, Watch a User, Connection Activity, and Recentontent.

Fig. 3. Example of uCern c

get options.

“I watch my Connection Activity. This widget shows all the activityof every person that is my connection and I have it display themaximum number of posts of 100. (. . .) I don’t use this widget withthe expectation of reading everything that people are creating. I useit to view trends. Where is the activity happening? Is it around ablog or that document or this discussion. If I think it’s interestingor important, I can go check it out. No pressure to read all of it.”

“I am a people watcher. I use the Watch a User widget to watchexecutives, my manager, and others on my team. I can then quicklyscan to see if something new has been posted by those individuals.Keeps me up to date on the doing of the important people.”

ustomized interface.

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.2.3. Information sharinguCern was reported to be a place where users formed a vari-

ty of groups around certain shared interests regardless of theiramiliarity with each other. These groups were a place where mem-ers met to borrow and/or share information with other uCernsers. Participants felt that filtering information by use of wid-ets to view the content of interest increased the probability theyould find groups useful to them, individuals matching their inter-

sts, or content such as conversations, documents, and posts byther users that could assist them in their jobs. This pointed to theesire of uCern users to use the knowledge of others in carryingut job related tasks. For this purpose participants most used wid-ets like Your Groups, Your Projects, Popular Discussions, and Recentontent.

“I use the engineering list to discover recent conversations that Ishould be aware of. uCern is fragmented, if you haven’t heard ofthe conversation, you don’t know it exists. So, this is the only wayI can discover groups that are useful to me and my job withouthaving people point them to me.”“It helps me find other people that I can collaborate with to anextent (. . .) Most groups I’m a member of it’s because I talkedto somebody or had an e-mail or someone said, ‘Go and followit.’ But this whole customized widgets panel is to get other onesto drag through the cracks, where I can go, ‘Oh, this discussionis pertinent. Let me see if I can get to that group to access thatdiscussion.”

.2.4. Organization and ease of access to contentuCern was seen as an extensive application that had a lot of

ontent; therefore, participants reported using widgets as toolsor enabling easier navigation within uCern and finding relevantontent in a fast and easy manner. As a result, participants usedidgets to customize their uCern views in order to organize con-

ent in a convenient way and save time when seeking informationn uCern. The most used widgets in this category included Places,paces, Bookmarks, and Recent Content.

“With the amount of content available on uCern, I need to filtermy information feeds down to what matters to me most during myday-to-day workflows. This is my recent content and content fromthose in my network. This helps me to be able to effectively findcontent quickly, without searches.”“I created a formatted text widget that has my top groups that I needto monitor for my work. Every morning first thing and a few timesduring the day, I open all of those groups into tabs in my browserand review for the most recently updated content. If I don’t see anychange in that Recent Activity widget, I move on to the next group.If I find something interesting or something I need to respond to, Ido it right then.”

.2.5. Utilitarian use of widgetsA few participants indicated that they chose widgets that

ere either hobby related or of high utility regardless of theirsefulness for work related activities, for example, the Weatheridget.

.3. Research question 2: issues with awareness widgets

Overall, participants were generally satisfied with theerceived increase in the level of general awareness insidehe uCern environment and efficiency in accessing infor-

ation relevant to them on uCern due to use of widgets.

y using widgets to aggregate important information inne place, users reported saving time that they would oth-rwise have spent accessing multiple pages of the sharedorkspace. In a shared online workspace like uCern with

mation Management 33 (2013) 401– 407 405

hundreds or even thousands of users, a lot of contentcan be generated within a short time, with a likelihood ofoverwhelming users of the workspace. Participants appreciatedthe value of widgets in helping them manage the large volumes ofcontent created in uCern.

At the same time, participants identified three mainissues that hindered them from fully utilizing widgets. Thesewere: (1) difficulties in personalizing widgets, (2) largeamounts of content generated by users that was not wellorganized, and (3) general usability issues of the sharedworkspace.

Particularly, respondents perceived the process of installing andcustomizing widgets as unintuitive. They expressed concern thatit was not easy for them to locate customization options on theworkspace. They also did not know how to move, resize, and editcontent while customizing widgets. They attributed these diffi-culties to the lack of clear instructions and support as well ascomplexity of uCern that had negative effect on its usability. Lackof support on how to fully utilize widgets resulted in other prob-lems such as excessive email notifications traffic. Although usersindicated that notifications kept them aware of activities in theshared workspace, they viewed too many notifications as a distrac-tion. One participant discussing why he stopped email notificationssaid: “Messages I received were always out of context of the con-versation. You only get that little snippet of someone’s comment.For my brain to process, I need to see the whole conversation incontext”.

Due to a large number of users of the online shared workspace,the amount of information that filtered through widgets was over-whelming, especially for users working on multiple projects andthose who wished to keep abreast of activities of several of theirproject team members and leaders. Participants also expressedfrustration that despite customizing their widgets to focus on rele-vant content on the workspace, a lot of irrelevant information suchas random conversations still filtered through and created obsta-cles for focused collaboration. As one participant noted: “For mostusers, this widget [Recent Content] at this point is about worthless (asnew stuff streams like crazy). For me, I use this to watch the diffusionof topics (i.e., watching to see trends on topics, a broader variety oftopics, etc.).”

General usability issues such as frequent changes also negativelyimpacted utilization of widgets in uCern in widget functionalityoccasioned by unexpected workspace redesigns. Users were con-cerned that redesign efforts meant to improve the usability of theworkspace sometimes had negative effects such as altering theway a widget worked thus altering its original purpose. Users werealso concerned about restrictive security settings on the workspacethat prevented them from fine tuning their widget customizationsto meet their needs, which significantly hindered the usefulnessof widgets provided on the workspace. Some participants in thisstudy reported experiencing difficulties related to system securityas they attempted to customize widgets to access content, discuss-ions, and other online resources associated with their groups andproject teams.

“Projects is handy with the minor exception that permissions ofhow to control these projects makes them almost useless. . . Projectmanager, for example, created this Mobile Surgeon project but Ican’t control the calendar although he has promoted me as far ashe can because it doesn’t allow that level of delegation. So, I foundthat annoying.”

Participants who did not use widgets on uCern (about 25% of allrespondents) reported that they did not do so mainly because of: (1)lack of awareness about widgets, (2) inability to customize widgets,

(3) perceived effort required to learn how to install, customize, anduse widgets, and (4) low perceived usefulness of widgets.

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. Discussion and implications

Online shared workspaces are known to generate large amountsf content in a short amount of time due to hundreds or evenhousands of users. Such amounts of information can be over-helming to users and be difficult to manage. One way to address

he problem of efficient and effective information management ishrough utilizing information technology (Detlor, 2010). In thistudy we investigated the use, perceived usefulness, and issuesssociated with the functionality of such information technol-gy, particularly widgets that are available in the online sharedorkspace.

We observed a variety of widgets’ utilization by study partic-pants: some used a larger number of widgets than the others;ome users preferred certain features over the others and thus usedidgets for different purposes. Despite such a variety, the primary

easons why participants used widgets were (1) to obtain infor-ation about ongoing activities, events, and discussions directly

elated to their professional and personal interests and (2) to eas-ly access the content. By using widgets in this regard, participantsromoted their own general situation and activity awareness thatrovided them with the context for individual activities. By aggre-ating relevant information in one place, participants used widgetss navigational aids that helped them to avoid cognitive overheadhat otherwise could have been caused by searching for contentf interest or recollecting its location and massive informationverload caused by information scatter. In both of these roles,idgets were used as information management tools. This find-

ng confirmed the point that people develop personal informationanagement strategies as a way of dealing with information over-

oad (Etzel, 1995).Team and group awareness was found to be an important

lement of team cognition (Fiore & Salas, 2004). Because wid-ets supported purposeful and spontaneous information exchangeetween those who knew about each other and needed each other’sxpertise as well as those who were unaware of each other buttill needed each other’s expertise, they functioned as informationharing tools. In this role, widgets contributed to promoting teamnd group awareness that existed among uCern users who wereorking towards common goals and shared common interests.

All in all, widget users were generally satisfied with theirerceived increase in the level of situation and activity aware-ess of their work environment, efficiency in accessing informationelevant to them on uCern, and overall experience with informa-ion management. At the same time, despite significant perceivedenefits of widgets reported by participants, this study revealed

number of issues related to their utilization that could haveeen standing on the way to efficient information management.ome of those included flaws with push technology (Edmunds &orris, 2000), particularly, the content and regularity of notifica-

ions. Because in most cases such notifications did not provide usersith full context of discussion, they only contributed to informa-

ion overload and could potentially discourage participants fromither using widgets at all or some of their functionality.

In addition to the above mentioned flaws, some study partic-pants simply did not know about the existence of widgets, didot care about using them due to lack of awareness about their

unctionality or had difficulties customizing them. Lack of timer intention to learn how to customize personal views with wid-ets, limited information about their features and functionality orimited individual skills could have also added to the existing issues

ith utilization of widgets.

Findings of the study allowed us to propose the following

mplications for the improvement of uCern and overall designnd development of online shared workspaces. Since participantseported having issues with using widgets and customizing their

mation Management 33 (2013) 401– 407

personal views, more tutorials or introductory training videosshould be available for new uCern users on a timely basis, be easy tolearn from and comprehend. Usability evaluations of widgets couldbe useful in revealing performance problems and obtaining userfeedback about the preferred features and functionality. Some par-ticipants reported overtime developing a routine for using certainwidgets. Whenever widgets’ functionality was changed withoutany warning, they felt frustrated. Such findings implied that sys-tem administrators should try to endeavour to put into accountuser opinion on proposed changes.

Overall, these implications suggest that design and functionalityof widgets should not be standing in the way of users’ produc-tivity. Their primary role should be in their ability to significantlyimprove mechanisms and strategies for creating, retrieving, and fil-tering information. Addressing some of these issues will allow forimprovement of user performance in online shared workspaces.

6. Conclusion

In this paper we presented a case study of widgets use in uCern.In online shared spaces with multitude of users who generate largeamounts of information there is a need to develop strategies forefficient and effective information management. In this study, par-ticipants reported using uCern widgets for this purpose. Besidespositive feedback received from participants about the perceivedusefulness of widgets as tools assisting them to avoid informa-tion overload and scatter on the application, a number of issuesregarding their usability were also reported.

The nature of the study, particularly the characteristics of thesample and data collection methods were major factors that shapedthe obtained results. Participants’ inconsistent response rate to thesome of the questionnaire questions, sample size, and the use ofthe instrument that was not a previously validated could have con-tributed to study limitations.

The nature of the study also opened possibilities for newapproaches in analyzing the phenomenon of use of informationtechnology for information management. Previous research foundthat information behavior of system users is greatly influencedby factors like work role, subject field, and type of organization(Wilson, 2000). As the sample of participants in this study waspretty diverse, there could have been differences in the use of wid-gets and perceptions about their usefulness among participantswith different professions and job roles.

Appendix A.

Survey questionnaire

1. Do you have your uCern view customized with widgets?2. How long have you been using uCern?3. What is the primary reason why you use uCern (e.g., stay aware

of the recent events and discussions, find people who share thesame professional interests, purchase items from Cerner Store,etc.)?

4. Do you use uCern for any of the projects you are currently work-ing on (e.g., for collaboration, information exchange, projectmanagement etc.)?

5. How frequently do you use uCern to stay aware of activitiesrelated to the project(s) you work on?

6. Please provide names of uCern widgets you use and explainwhy you chose those widgets.

7. How exactly do you use uCern to stay aware of these activities?Please, give examples.

8. Did you experience any issues when personalizing your uCernview with widgets?

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9. How long have you been working on at least one project youare frequently using uCern for?

0. What is/was your job role on this project?1. Which activity awareness elements do you view as the most

important for the current project(s) you are working on (e.g.,communication, cooperation, collaboration, coordination, orinformation sharing)?

2. How important for you is to stay aware of activities of otherteam members who work on the same project with you?

3. How do/did uCern widgets help you stay aware of the activitiesof other team members?

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Dinara Saparova is currently a doctoral student in the School of Information Scienceand Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri (MU). Her research inter-ests include online information behavior of information seekers and design andevaluation of performance support systems. She is also a Senior Graduate ResearchAssistant at the MU Information Experience Laboratory. Her work there focuses onevaluations of various aspects of human-computer interaction.

Francis Kibaru is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Science and Learn-ing Technologies at the University of Missouri. His broad areas of research interestinclude interactive learning systems, leveraging emerging web technologies forteaching and learning, and quality assurance of online courses programs in highereducation.

Josipa Basic is a doctoral student in the School of Information Science and Learn-ing Technologies at the University of Missouri. She works as a Research Assistant

at the Information Experience Laboratory at the same University. She receivedboth Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science from theUniversity of Zadar, Croatia. Her research interest is opportunistic discovery of infor-mation, accessibility and universal design, and usability testing with people withdisabilities.