Measurement of team mental model as a part of a new team usability testing method: A proposed research agenda

Abstract

These days, people usually work together in teams because it is believed that people work effectively together. That is why teamwork and different team phenomena are popular research areas in the last few decades. As teamwork became a common form of work, more and more software's aim is to help the team members' collaboration, which creates a special problem in usability testing. There are several usability methods for individual tests, but only a few for groups and teams. We argue that there might be usability problems which only occur in a team situation, so it is necessary to complete individual methods with team methods when testing collaborative software. As a collaborative software aims to help collaboration, it is a highly relevant problem. Therefore, we attempt to create a new empirical team usability testing method. It will fill the above mentioned gap in usability testing methods as it will be an empirical method which helps to better understand the usability problems of collaborative software. This paper proposes research directions to examine how the measurement of team mental model would fit in this new method.