Illusive, Ineffective, Inefficient, Ideal: Standardized Coordination Task Assessments of Awareness Support

Awareness support in cooperative systems provides users with mutual information on each others’ presence and activities. Measuring its effectiveness is a complex task since people tend to forget quickly. Therefore, it becomes imperative to use a technique generating results while a user’s awareness is still present. The Standardized Coordination Task Assessment measures response times and error rates visualizing the results in a four quadrant system distinguishing illusive, ineffective, inefficient, and ideal systems. This helps awareness support researchers and designers to drive their effort into the right direction already at early development stages.