Mixed-focus collaboration without compromising individual or group work
Prasun Dewan, Puneet Agarwal, Gautam M. Shroff, Rajesh Mahanand Hegde · 2010
In mixed-focus collaboration, users "continuously" switch between "individual" and "group" work. We have developed a new two-person interaction mechanism, coupled tele-desktops, that is, arguably, not biased towards individual or group work. We evaluate this mechanism, and the general idea of mixed-focus collaboration, using a new quantitative framework consisting of (a) a set of precisely-defined coupling modes determining the extent of individual and group work, and (b) the times spent in, durations of, and number of transitions among these modes. We describe a new visualization scheme for compactly displaying these metrics in an individual collaborative session. We use this framework to characterize about forty six person hours of use of coupled tele-desktops, most of which involved collaborative use of a UI builder. Our results include (a) quantitative motivation for coupled tele-desktops, and (b) several new quantitative observations, and quantification of several earlier qualitative observations regarding mixed-focus collaboration.