Supporting Collaboration through Human-Centered Design

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:33

Users often face challenges with collaborative technologies because they are not designed based on a rich understanding of their context of use.  One way to overcome this challenge is to study the social practices and routines of people and then design around this understanding.  In this talk, I illustrate this message by describing two case studies in detail and then briefly highlighting several additional projects.  First, I look at the privacy concerns of telecommuters as they attempt to collaborate and maintain communication with colleagues at the office through video conferencing systems.  I discuss findings from a controlled experiment that investigates how awareness needs interplay with privacy concerns when video obfuscation is used to mitigate privacy in the video channel.  I then outline a context-aware home video conferencing system as one possible solution to address the needs of telecommuters.  Second, I move out of the workplace and into the home where I describe the calendaring routines of families as a means to understand how technology can support the coordination challenges they face.  I outline findings from applied ethnographic interviews and then describe an inkable digital family calendar for the Tablet PC called LINC.  I then describe findings from a field deployment of LINC in the homes of real families that show the value of designing calendars which are able to fit within and extend family calendaring routines.  Third, I briefly highlight several additional projects that investigate collaboration including the study and design of email tools, distributed whiteboard applications, and domestic communication systems.  From the workplace to the domestic, these case studies illustrate that designing with a human-centered perspective can help create useable, useful, and socially appropriate collaborative technologies.