Support Different Styles of Collaboration Workspaces

While the research presented in this dissertation focused on co-located synchronous workspaces in the two studies, the concepts of interactive event timeline and the Callout Bubble can be applied to other types of collaborative work. Collaborative workspaces can be broken down into four quadrants as proposed by Johansen (1991): co-located vs. remote by synchronous vs. asynchronous. Co-located workspaces refer to users working in the same physical location while remote workspaces refer to situations when users are distributed. Synchronous work refers to people working at the same time while asynchronous work refers to people working in shifts and thus require some forms of hand off.

Co-located Synchronous (Non-Turn-Based)

The event timeline presented in this dissertation showed a turn-based view and had a fixed structure. In the future, it can be redesigned to incorporate real-time data. It may be applied to multi-device classrooms to provide situation awareness for teachers. By providing aggregated information of students’ activities, the timeline could help improve teachers’ awareness of students’ work progress and their classroom management. The timeline can become a representation closer to an information dashboard, which contains information such as amount of new creations of objects in the workspace for each group, idling time, and visual overview of each group’s workspace.

Future work can also consider adapting the timelines to other domains that involve real-time data such as military training. Designers need to consider additional concerns related to handling real-time data. For example, users cannot control the pace of automated events, and new changes may happen while users are exploring the changes. Historical events in the timeline may be related to a moving object on the shared workspace, and the timeline may be moving as time ticks. The visual design needs to investigate how to provide situation awareness for the user to understand the connection between the historical events and the moving objects. The system also needs to consider how to provide workspace awareness of interactions involving moving objects. Although the visual design of the timeline will be quite different to incorporate real-time data, the main features of the interactive event timeline should be preserved, e.g., contain historical information, present meaningful overview data, show detail information upon interaction, highlight events in context, and present meaningful static visualization.

Co-located Asynchronous Work

The interactive event timelines can be applied to asynchronous work to facilitate hand-off in many domains such as emergency response. In the Timeline Study, the animated walkthrough of previous game events, shown at the beginning of the study sessions, was helpful for participants to understand large amounts of historical information. However, it took time for the participants to watch the animation. Similarly, Scott et al. (2006) found that animated interruption assistant required longer task completion time than the bookmark assistant interface, which allowed users to select from a timeline to replay a specific animated sequence of events. Timelines could incorporate controls for animated contents to support the hand-off process during asynchronous work to reduce the viewing time. Attention will also need to be paid to adapt this approach for multi-user environments to ensure the appropriate balance between the power of an individual and their distraction to the entire group. Further research is needed to optimize the design for timeline as an awareness display and a hand-off tool for asynchronous work in a collaborative environment.

Remote Synchronous Collaborative Work

Callout Bubble could also be used for synchronous remote workspace. A student who is sick at home could participate remotely by connecting to the shared canvas, and a group of students could work on their homework in the shared canvas from their respective homes. In a remote scenario, Callout Bubbles are even more important since they provide workspace awareness to help users find out who is working on what and where. Design teams may conduct remote brainstorming sessions that require people to work in parallel in a shared virtual workspace to gather ideas and annotate or modify each other’s work. Callout Bubbles can be adapted for this usage scenario. Teams preparing for a

presentation in a free-form workspace, such as Prezi22_{, will also need Callout bubbles to keep each}

other aware of new edits and work progress.

Remote Asynchronous Work

The SMART ampTM _{application has also been used for remote asynchronous work. Informal}

observations showed that students sometimes misinterpreted the meaning of the Callout Bubble in this context. Schools sometimes organize cross-school collaborative projects. Students would be

working in the shared canvas at different times since they have different schedules for the particular class. Students entering the workspace might see new changes. Since the system provided no historical information of who conducted which types of edits on which objects at what time, the students attributed the changes to any students who continued to edit the previously modified objects. Students sometimes questioned the current editor about changes made by previous editors of the same object. This created confusion in the collaborative workspace. Thus, students may benefit from similar historical information provided by the timelines for catching up to the changes in this context. However, further research needs to explore how to engage users to use timelines for exploring large amounts of data and how to optimize the visual presentation of events in timelines.