Extended Radar View and Modification Director: Awareness Mechanisms for Synchronous Collaborative Authoring

Tran, M.H., Yang, Y. and Raikundalia, G.K.

Providing effective support for group awareness is a critical requirement of synchronous collaborative authoring tools. This paper reports our work on developing new awareness mechanisms including Extended Radar View (ERV) and Modification Director (MD) for CoWord, a synchronous collaborative authoring tool that is developed based on Microsoft Word. ERV supports awareness for collaborative authoring tasks by showing both users' telecarets-eye views-the locations of working areas-and over-the-shoulder views-the locations of viewing areas in a shared Word document. MD keeps track of changes in the document, and notifies users when their text is modified by other people. This paper also reports an ongoing user-based study that is conducted to evaluate the usefulness of ERV and MD. The preliminary results show that ERV is useful in supporting group awareness, and ERV is preferred to a conventional radar view. MD was found useful to some extent in supporting awareness for collaborative authoring.

Cite as: Tran, M.H., Yang, Y. and Raikundalia, G.K. (2006). Extended Radar View and Modification Director: Awareness Mechanisms for Synchronous Collaborative Authoring. In Proc. Seventh Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC2006), Hobart, Australia. CRPIT, 50. Piekarski, W., Ed. ACS. 45-52.

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