Communicating across Unequal Computer Platforms

People use personal data assistants in the field to collect data and to communicate with others both in the field and office. The individual in the office invariably has a laptop or a high-end personal workstation and thus, significantly more computing power, more screen real estate, and higher volume input devices, such as a mouse and keyboard. These differences give the high end user the ability to represent and manipulate collaborative tasks more effectively. It is therefore useful to know what impact these differences have on work performance and work communications. Four different platform combinations involving a PC and a PDA were used to examine the effect of communicating via heterogeneous computer platforms. The PC platform used a mouse, a keyboard, and a 3-dimensional screen display. The PDA platform used a stylus, soft buttons, and a 2-dimensional screen display. A variation of the Tetris wall-building game called Slow Tetris was used as the subjects’ collaborative task. A second factor in the experiment was role asymmetry. One subject was arbitrarily put in charge of the task solution in all of the combinations. An analysis of the solution times found that subjects with mixed platforms worked slower than their homogeneous counterparts, i.e., a person in charge with a PC worked faster if his partner had a PC. An in-depth analysis of the communication patterns found significant differences in the exchanges between heterogeneous and homogenous combinations. The PC-to-PDA combination (with the person on the PC in charge of the solution) took significantly more time than the PC-to-PC combination. This extra time appears to come from the disadvantage of having a partner on the PDA who is unable to help in solving the problems. The PDA-to-PC combination took approximately the same amount of time as the PDA-to-PDA combination despite having one team member with a better representation. This member was, unfortunately, not in charge of the solution. The PDA-to-PC heterogeneous combination exhibited more direction giving, less one-sided collaboration, and more takeover attempts than any of the other combinations. Overall, roles were maintained in the partnerships except for the person with the PDA directing the person with the PC.