An Investigation of Groupware Support for Collaborative Awareness Through Distortion-Oriented Views

Abstract

This article reviews models and theoretical frameworks of collaborative awareness in the use of real-time groupware systems. The review is used to motivate and guide an investigation of distortion-oriented mechanisms for supporting collaborators' fluid and dynamic awareness requirements. We describe our development and evaluation of DOME, a distortion-oriented multiuser editor. Although we designed DOME to provide a realistic and useful platform for the investigation of awareness concepts, our evaluation revealed major flaws in its support for distortion-oriented awareness. We analyze the cause of these errors, some of which were not detected in prior work, and provide precise formulations that will overcome them.