Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity

People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another’s intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system—stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support—to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity. r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.