Novel Group Awareness Mechanisms for Real-Time Collaborative Document Authoring

Group awareness has become important in improving the usability of real-time, distributed, collaborative writing systems. However, the current set of implemented awareness mechanisms is insufficient in providing extensive and comprehensive awareness in collaborative document authoring. Certainly, current mechanisms, such as telepointers and multi-user scrollbars, have contributed in providing awareness support in collaborative authoring. Yet, given the shortcomings of these mechanisms and the difficulty in providing rich interaction found in face-to-face collaboration, much more support needs to be provided for group awareness during authoring. This research extends the pool of all known awareness mechanisms (including those that have been discovered before but have yet to be implemented). This research discovered several awareness mechanisms not found and reported elsewhere, through conducting usability experiments with a realtime cooperative editor. This paper covers three of the mec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ADCS
• Authors: Gitesh K. Raikundalia, Hao Lan Zhang
• Keywords: ADCS 2004, Applied Computing, Awareness, Awareness Mechanisms, Group Awareness