High-speed coordination in groupware

Abstract

Coordination is important in groupware because it helps users collaborate efficiently. However, groupware systems in which activities occur at a faster pace need faster coordination in order to keep up with the speed of the activity. Faster coordination is especially needed when actions are dependent on one another (i.e., they are tightly-coupled) and when each user can see and interact with other users’ actions as they occur (i.e., real time). There is little information available about this type of fast coordination (also named high-speed coordination or HSC) in groupware. In this thesis, I addressed this problem by providing a body of principles and information about high-speed coordination. This solution was achieved by creating a groupware game called RTChess and then conducting an exploratory evaluation in which high-speed coordination was investigated. The results of this evaluation show that there were small amounts of high-speed coordination in the game and that high-speed coordination was difficult to achieve. In addition, HSC was affected by five main characteristics of the groupware environment: user experience, level of awareness of the partner’s interactions, communication between partners, number of dependencies that affect the user’s interactions, and pace of activities in the system.