Using usability and user experience scores to design an Augmented Reality-based Ambient Awareness interface to support spatially dispersed teams

Abstract

One major determinant for the performance and productivity of teams is the temporal coordination of interdependent sub-tasks within the teamwork process. The accuracy of the temporal coordination significantly depends on whether the team member share a precise mental model of the teamwork process, which encompasses the current process state and the desired outcome. The more the assumptions of the individual team members about the current process state deviate, the less precise the temporal coordination of the team is. Looking at spatially dispersed teams, this challenge becomes even more complicated, since such teams have no naturally existing common cues, from which they can derive corresponding process relevant information. Therefore, this work presents a user-centered design approach to develop an Augmented Reality-based assistance system for the Microsoft HoloLens 1. Its goal is to support the temporal coordination of spatially dispersed teams by utilizing a method that can present information in an at-a-glance manner and helps the user to remain aware of the information without being overwhelmed or distracted by it, denoted Ambient Awareness. In order to develop a system with the highest possible team- and tasktechnology fit, we aggregated usability and user experience scores in a two-part user study with n $=$ 22 experts in the sense of a user-centered design process. To this end, we first determined the usability in a laboratory experimental setting. On the basis of the aggregated data, we identified three essential interface configuration clusters in the first step, which were evaluated subsequently according to their user experience in an online assessment. This two-step user-centered evaluation design allowed us to derive a user interface configuration that provides the highest team- and task-technology-fit under the given application-specific conditions.