Person-computer cooperation through collaborative manipulation
Loren Terveen · 1991
The primary contribution of this research is to state, motivate, and evaluate an approach to the design of cooperative computer systems. The approach has been embodied in a knowledge editing tool, the HITS Knowledge Editor (HKE). Empirical testing of HKE has shown the effectiveness of the approach. The HKE approach grounds person-computer cooperation on collaborative manipulation of objects in a shared workspace. It addresses two key issues in the design of cooperative systems--how to distribute responsibility for doing the task between users and the system and how to manage the user-system interaction. In HKE, users design knowledge structures in the shared workspace; by inspecting the partial designs, the system is able to offer several types of assistance, including noticing problems with the design and offering repairs, suggesting additional representational issues, and proposing completions of unfinished work. Since significant amounts of interaction occur through manipulation of objects in the shared workspace, many problems with computing and interpreting textual advice are avoided. The collaborative manipulation approach has been empirically evaluated in a study that compared subjects' performance on HKE and another knowledge editing tool based on a different approach. The studies showed that (1) the expertise about the knowledge editing task embodied in HKE facilitated the performance of novice users, and (2) providing a workspace and organizing the interaction around manipulation of objects in the workspace eased the interaction for all users.