Communicating through Handheld Wireless Tablets: Livenotes and Shared Group Awareness

Usability in real-time collaborative applications can be improved with better workspace awareness. In particular, the radar view is the most intuitive user-interface widget for workspace awareness. We extend previous work by developing a radar-like widget to explore how workspace awareness can be supported in wider and non-laboratory settings that scale to over two users. Despite the widget’s novelty, test users soon learned to manipulate it with ease. Prior to introducing this awareness widget, users were observed to perform two types of highly collaborative activities: low-level usage of the user-interface and highlevel, visual dialogue between users. As the next step, we plan to employ conversation maps to identify ways in which this widget facilitates such dialogue. We adopt this choice of collaborative practices to analyze due to the profound influence that dialogue bears on learning.