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Title |
Evaluation of Existing Group Awareness Mechanisms in a Real-time Distributed Collaborative Writing System |
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Author |
Ahmedul Islam, Gitesh K. Raikundalia |
| Citation |
Vol. 7 No. 12 pp. 161-170 |
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Abstract |
Group awareness reflects the awareness of other people and their actions in a group while working collaboratively. Various facts (for example, where others are located) or issues (for example, what others are intending to work on a document) are known from this awareness. Group awareness is very important for successful collaborative writing. Our research thereby evaluates some existing awareness mechanisms regarding their effectiveness in achieving group awareness. Accordingly, we formulate the research question of whether the existing awareness mechanisms are effective enough to obtain group awareness and what are the problems of these current awareness mechanisms. We evaluate these awareness mechanisms by conducting usability experiments using the CoWord collaborative document writing system. Since CoWord is chosen as it leverages from Microsoft Word, this research evaluates the awareness mechanisms already implemented in CoWord. These mechanisms include Radar View, Telepointers, Collaborative Highlighting and Collaborative Change Tracking. We have conducted five experiments. This paper presents the details of these experiments and result gathered from these experiments. The results are about the effectiveness and user preference of the awareness mechanisms. |
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Keywords |
Group awareness, awareness mechanism, collaborative document writing |
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