AN AWARENESS TOOL FOR ASYNCHRONOUS,
DISTRIBUTED WORKGROUPS
Jonathan J. Cadiz, Robert E. Kraut, F. Javier Lerch,
Susan R. Fussell, Matthew M. McNally and William L. Scherlis
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA USA
+1 412 268 7694
kraut+@andrew.cmu.edu
ABSTRACT
Members of interdependent work groups must coordinate
their efforts in intricate ways. These coordination efforts
are more successful if team members can stay aware of the
state of their team, its tasks, and its environment. A major
design goal for tools supporting distributed workgroups is
to keep members apprised of important changes without
distracting them from their focal tasks. Passive awareness
tools coming from the Computer Supported Cooperative
Work tradition have only explored a small part of the
design space. This paper describes The Awareness Monitor,
a tool that provides passive awareness. We discuss design
criteria for providing passive awareness and show how The
Awareness Monitor addresses those criteria.
Keywords
Work groups, coordination, situational awareness, passive
awareness,
cognitive
overload,
computer-mediated
communication, awareness devices
tool designed to support passive awareness for small work
groups. We discuss design criteria for providing passive
awareness and show how The Awareness Monitor
addresses those criteria.
DESIGN
CRITERIA
AWARENESS
PROVIDING
PASSIVE
Limitations on human attention are a major constraint on
tools designed to support passive awareness for distributed
work groups. The major problem is that the information
needed to maintain awareness of team, task, and
environment may overwhelm team members and distract
them from actually doing work. It is difficult, for example,
to write one’s section of a document if one is continually
checking on a teammates’ progress or to organize a
response to competitors if one is always monitoring their
product plans. Thus, the effective design of tools for
passive awareness must answer two questions:
1.
What information is most valuable to provide to the
team and what can be ignored?
2.
How should information be presented so that it is
available when needed, without distracting people from
their focal tasks?
INTRODUCTION
Members of managerial task forces, software engineering
teams, flight crews, and other interdependent work groups
must coordinate their efforts in intricate ways to be
successful. There is substantial evidence that if team
members can stay aware of the state of the team, task, and
environment they will be more successful (e.g., [1, 5, 6]).
FOR
What information is it useful for a team to monitor?
To achieve this awareness, teams often rely heavily on
active communication to inform each other about status and
plans. Teams can also rely on passive monitoring of the
work and the environment to maintain awareness. When
groups are co-located, getting information requires little
active effort, and members can maintain passive awareness
simply by monitoring activities going on around them.
However, the task of passively monitoring information
about the task, the team, or its environment is substantially
more difficult for distributed work groups and requires
some degree of technological support.
The information that will be important to a group depends
crucially on the tasks that the particular group and the tasks
it needs to perform. The architecture of the Awareness
Monitor separates task specific information from generic
rules for reasoning about and displaying this information.
The version of the Awareness Monitor described here was
designed for business students at Carnegie Mellon
University participating in a realistic business simulation
called the Management Game In this simulation, five to
six member teams run a virtual consumer-products
company. Teams compete with one another over the course
of a simulated two-year business period condensed into 14
actual weeks.
A long-standing goal in both the information retrieval (IR)
and the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
communities is to develop tools that support passive
awareness. This paper describes The Awareness Monitor, a
During the simulation, teams make decisions regarding the
nature, production, distribution, and financing of their
products (watches).They must also, in a series of reports
and presentations, present their companies’ strategies to an
(for example, a teammate, the price of a company’s stock ,
or an Excel spreadsheet) and a set of rules to specify how
that data should be watched. Each monitor displays a seven
point scale, which is the system’s recommendation for the
amount of attention the user should pay to a particular
information source.
To support the students in the Management Game business
simulation, monitors can be created to watch several types
of data, including:

Changes to files in the students’ shared directory

The current prices of firms in the stock market

The amount of shares traded for each firm

The current net worth of the user


The status of the user’s proposals to sell or buy stock
(“asks” and “bids”)
The values of cells on Excel spreadsheets
How should information to maintain passive awareness
be presented?
Figure 1: The main window of the awareness device. The
tree is composed of monitors (“Net Worth”, “Marketing”)
and monitor groups (“Team Assets”, “Sales”).
external boards of directors comprised of local business
people. Furthermore, the simulation is punctuated by crises
such as lawsuits and threats of work stoppages that call for
rapid mobilization of effort and quick responses.
In addition to managing their team’s firm, students also
trade shares of other teams’ companies in a simulated stock
marketStudents’ grades are based on their team’s
performance and on the performance of their stock portfolio
in the simulated stock market.
Four types of information are important for each student to
monitor: information about the behavior of their teammates,
about status of their firm, about their firm’s competitors,
and about the firms in their stock market. This information
is available to students in three ways: (1) students can
observe teammates and communicate with them, getting a
wealth of information through direct communication, (2)
students can access the simulated stock market via the
World Wide Web to see the current prices of each firm’s
stock; (3) at the end of each simulated business quarter,
several Excel spreadsheets are made available that outline
numerous variables describing the status of the simulated
world and every firm (e.g., market share, currency exchange
rates, and profits).
The Awareness Monitor provides methods to monitor all
three sources of information. Figure 1 shows the main
window of The Awareness Monitor. The basic unit is a
monitor, which represents a combination of a piece of data
The goal of an awareness tool is to help teams monitor
changes to important resources while imposing minimally
on their attention. Balancing informativeness and
intrusiveness is a difficult design challenge [2, 3]. While
work on information visualization attempts to display a
large amount of information in a form that users can use
(e.g., [8]), minimizing attention demands is rarely a design
criterion.
There has been no systematic research we are aware of
identifying design principles for passive awareness
displays. We hypothesize, however, that successful displays
will support asynchronous presentation, aggregation,
decomposition, proportionality, and customizability, in
addition to other properties not yet identified.
Asynchronous presentation
By providing information asynchronously one may reduce
attentional demands without reducing the usefulness of the
information (e.g., [4]). Because the receivers can fit
asynchronous messages into their task schedules, an
increase in volume of asynchronous messages leads to
substantially less overload than an comparable increase in
synchronous messages.
The Awareness Monitor allows for both synchronous and
asynchronous presentation. The Awareness Monitor can be
used asynchronously by hiding the main window (Figure 1)
and only checking it when necessary, much like a person
may check for e-mail. The main window can also be used
synchronously if it is kept visible constantly; however, the
size of the window makes such use impractical. For this
reason, The Awareness Monitor also provides a small ticker
window (Figure 2) which can be placed on the desktop and
set to stay visible no matter what the user is doing. The
ticker window cycles through the monitors by fading from
one item to the next or by scrolling the items across the
Figure 2: The ticker window. This window cycles through
the monitors by fading from one item to the next or by
scrolling items across the window. The specific piece of
information for each monitor (e.g., current stock price) can
be hidden to minimize the amount of screen space used.
window, allowing the user to glance up at the window and
receive notifications of the current state of data being
watched by The Awareness Monitor. A display that slowly
changes is likely to be less intrusive than one that presents
the individual changes directly.
Aggregation
A display capable of displaying a summary of changes is
less likely to be intrusive than an interface that displays a
larger number of individual changes. For example, rather
than presenting each message in order in a user’s electronic
mailbox, the databases used in several organizational
memory systems consolidate all messages on a particular
topic and provide an indicator to potential users of the
volume of messages [7].
The Awareness Monitor accomplishes aggregation through
the use of monitor groups. Individual monitors can be
organized into groups, which are assigned a summary bar
graph icon. For example, in Figure 1, “Net Worth” and
“Asks & Bids” are the monitors than make up the “Stock
Portfolio” monitor group. Monitor groups allow the user to
see a summary of changes to a category of information.
each monitor: more activity causes more bars to appear.
For example, a monitor that watches for a firm’s stock
market trading volume will have a number of bars
proportional to the amount of shares that have been traded
for that firm.
Customizability
Because team members have different roles and tasks
within a group, awareness tools must allow people to keep
aware of different information using different weights. The
Awareness Monitor allows for this type of customizability
via a five-point importance scale that is a part of every
monitor. Recall that a monitor is a combination of a piece
of data and a set of rules. The five-point relative
importance rating is part of a monitor’s rule set. An
example set of rules for watching an Excel spreadsheet cell
is shown in Figure 3.
The top half of each rule set dialog box is the same for all
monitors: all rules are assigned an importance rating using
the slider bar in the upper left-hand corner. Because the
importance of an item often changes over time (for
instance, when an item has a deadline associated with it),
the upper right-hand portion of the dialog box displays the
deadline attached to the monitor, as well as a graph of how
the importance of the item changes over time. Clicking the
button with the importance graph brings the user to the
dialog box shown in Figure 4. This dialog box allows the
user to modify the deadline and the way in which the
importance changes over time.
The bottom half of the rule set dialog box consists of the
Decomposition
Users need a mechanism to view the individual changes that
have contributed to an aggregate level of importance; they
need to be able to move smoothly between aggregate and
individual data sources.
The Awareness Monitor addresses decomposition in two
ways: first, users can expand monitor groups to see how
each individual monitor is contributing to the aggregate bar
graph icon; second, The Awareness Monitor provides a
piece of specific information for each monitor (for example,
the current price of a company’s stock or the current value
of an Excel cell). When a monitor is selected, this piece of
information is shown in the status bar at the bottom lefthand corner of the main window (Figure 1). The time at the
bottom right-hand corner is the last time the information
was updated. The piece of information attached to each
monitor is also displayed in the ticker window (Figure 2),
although the information can be hidden to minimize the
screen space used by the ticker.
Proportionality
Aggregated displays need to be constructed so that larger or
more important changes in the environment register larger
changes in the user interface. This criterion is addressed by
The Awareness Monitor by the amount of bars shown with
Figure 3: An example of a rule set for watching a cell in an
Excel spreadsheet. The top portion of all rule sets is the same
whereas the bottom portion differs according to the type of the
rule set.
identifying the useful information, identifying principles for
information display, and understanding the utility of these
tools on the effectiveness of team performance. We are
deploying The Awareness Monitor in the Management
Game in September and will have evaluation data to report
at CSCW.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jason Reisman and Tim Canfield developed the software to
monitor changes that occur within a Microsoft Windows
NT file system.
This research was supported by a contract from the Defense
Advanced Research Project Agency.
REFERENCES
Figure 4: The dialog box used to set a deadline for a rule set
as well as the way in which importance changes over time.
events to watch. Whereas defining the importance is the
same for each rule set, the “events to watch” portion of each
rule set is different for each type of data (for example, the
possibilities for monitoring a team member are different
than the possibilities for monitoring a cell on an Excel
spreadsheet).
The monitor capable of watching Excel spreadsheet cells is
noteworthy in relation to the criterion of customization
because it allows students to program complex decision
rules about combinations of information to track. The
complexity of these decisions can then be hidden by The
Awareness Monitor.
Adaptability
Because the value that users put on information will change
with time, they need a mechanism to explicitly indicate
their current preferences. Because preferences can be
revealed through behavior, rules that adapt to recent
changes in their viewing behavior would ease the interface
burden of keeping preferences updated. Currently The
Awareness Monitor does allow explicit indications of
preferences through the five-point importance scale, but it
does not analyze user behavior to adjust the interface.
NEXT STEPS
To date, most CSCW research on awareness tools has been
inventive, but ad hoc. We need more systematic research on
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