Transparent collaboration: letting users simulate another user's world

While trying to learn how to use current collaboration systems, users face many challenges, including difficulty trying out new features and experimenting without their actions affecting other users. This paper proposes an innovative approach to solve these problems by simulating the collaboration system. In this simulated environment, a user can: confirm the effect of certain actions on other people before performing the actions; check what information can be accessed by other users; and interact as another user to see if the user can perform tasks as expected. By simulating the collaboration with more than one person simultaneously, a user can test synchronous communication features using a single account. Integrating this solution into the current collaboration environment will improve the usability of collaboration software, and reduce users' reliance on administrators to support their collaboration interactions.