Carl Gutwin
Has also published under the name of:
"C. Gutwin"
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Publications by Carl Gutwin (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Alexander, Jason, Cockburn, Andy, Fitchett, Stephen, Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2009): Revisiting read wear: analysis, design, and evaluation of a footprints scrollbar. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1665-1674. Available online
“In this paper, we show that people frequently return to previously-visited regions within their documents, and that scrollbars can be enhanced to ease this task. We analysed 120 days of activity logs from Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. Our analysis shows that region revisitation is a common activity that can be supported with relatively short recency lists. This establishes an empirical foundation for the design of an enhanced scrollbar containing scrollbar marks that helps people return to previously visited document regions. Two controlled experiments show that scrollbar marks decrease revisitation time, and that a large number of marks can be used effectively. We then design an enhanced Footprints scrollbar that supports revisitation with several features, including scrollbar marks and mark thumbnails. Two further experiments show that the Footprints scrollbar was frequently used and strongly preferred over traditional scrollbars.”
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Pinelle, David, Wong, Nelson, Stach, Tadeusz and Gutwin, Carl (2009): Usability heuristics for networked multiplayer games. In: GROUP09 - International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2009. pp. 169-178. Available online
“Networked multiplayer games must support a much wider variety of interactions than single-player games because networked games involve communication and coordination between players. This means that designers must consider additional usability issues that relate to group play -- but there are currently no usability engineering methods that are specifically oriented towards the needs of multiplayer games. To address this problem, we developed a new set of usability heuristics, called Networked Game Heuristics (NGH), which can be used in the design and evaluation of networked multiplayer games. The new heuristics were identified by analyzing problem reports from 382 reviews of networked PC games, covering six main genres. We aggregated problem reports into ten problem categories (covering issues from session management to cheating to training for novice players) and developed heuristics that describe how these usability problems can be avoided. We tested the new heuristics by having evaluators use them and an existing set to assess the usability of two networked games. Evaluators found more usability problems with NGH, and stated that the new heuristics were better for evaluating multiplayer game usability. Our research is the first to present networked game heuristics that are derived from real problem reports, and the first to evaluate the heuristics' effectiveness in a realistic usability test.”
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Hancock, Mark S., Nacenta, Miguel A., Gutwin, Carl and Carpendale, Sheelagh (2009): The Effects of Changing Projection Geometry on the Interprestation of 3D Orientation on Tabletops. In: Proceedings of Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Tabletop 2009, Banff, Canada. pp. 175-182. Available online
Nacenta, Miguel A., Gutwin, Carl, Aliakseyeu, Dima and Subramanian, Sriram (2009): There and Back again: Cross-Display Object Movement in Multi-Display Environments. In Human-Computer Interaction, 24 (1) pp. 170-229
» 2008 «
Nacenta, Miguel A., Mandryk, Regan L. and Gutwin, Carl (2008): Targeting across displayless space. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 777-786. Available online
“Multi-monitor displays and multi-display environments are now common. Cross-display cursor movement, in which a user moves the pointer from one display to another, occurs frequently in these settings. There are several techniques for supporting this kind of movement, and these differ in the way that they deal with displayless space (the physical space between displays). Stitching is the method used by most operating systems; in this technique, the cursor jumps from the edge of one display directly into the next display. In contrast, Mouse Ether maps the motor space of the mouse exactly to the physical space of the displays, meaning that the cursor has to travel across displayless space until it reaches the next display. To determine which of these approaches is best for cross-display movement, we carried out a study comparing Stitching, Mouse Ether, and a variant of Mouse Ether with Halo for off-screen feedback. We found that Stitching is equivalent to or faster than any variant of Mouse Ether, and that Halo improves Ether's performance (but not enough to outperform Stitching). Results also indicate that the larger the gap between displays, the longer the targeting takes -- even for Stitching. These findings provide valuable guidance for practitioners and raise new interesting questions for research.”
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Gustafson, Sean, Baudisch, Patrick, Gutwin, Carl and Irani, Pourang (2008): Wedge: clutter-free visualization of off-screen locations. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 787-796. Available online
“To overcome display limitations of small-screen devices, researchers have proposed techniques that point users to objects located off-screen. Arrow-based techniques such as City Lights convey only direction. Halo conveys direction and distance, but is susceptible to clutter resulting from overlapping halos. We present Wedge, a visualization technique that conveys direction and distance, yet avoids overlap and clutter. Wedge represents each off-screen location using an acute isosceles triangle: the tip coincides with the off-screen locations, and the two corners are located on-screen. A wedge conveys location awareness primarily by means of its two legs pointing towards the target. Wedges avoid overlap programmatically by repelling each other, causing them to rotate until overlap is resolved. As a result, wedges can be applied to numbers and configurations of targets that would lead to clutter if visualized using halos. We report on a user study comparing Wedge and Halo for three off-screen tasks. Participants were significantly more accurate when using Wedge than when using Halo.”
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Birnholtz, Jeremy P., Gutwin, Carl, Ramos, Gonzalo and Watson, Mark (2008): OpenMessenger: gradual initiation of interaction for distributed workgroups. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 1661-1664. Available online
“The initiation of interaction in face-to-face environments is a gradual process, and takes place in a rich information landscape of awareness, attention, and social signals. One of the main benefits of this process is that people can be more sensitive to issues of privacy and interruption while they are moving towards interaction. However, on-line communication tools do not provide this subtlety, and often lead to unwanted interruptions. We have developed a prototype message system called OpenMessenger (OM) that adds the idea of gradual initiation of interaction to on-line communication. OpenMessenger provides multiple levels of awareness about people, and provides notification to those about whom information is being gathered. OpenMessenger allows people to negotiate interaction in a richer fashion than is possible with any other current messaging system. Preliminary evaluation data suggest the utility of the approach, but also shows that there are a number of issues yet to be resolved in this area.”
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Pinelle, David, Nacenta, Miguel A., Gutwin, Carl and Stach, Tadeusz (2008): The Effects of Co-Present Embodiments on Awareness and Collaboration in Tabletop Groupware. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Graphics Interface May 28-30, 2008, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. pp. 1-8.
“Most current tabletop groupware systems use direct touch, where people manipulate objects by touching them with a pen or a fingertip. The use of people's real arms and hands provides obvious awareness information, but workspace access is limited by the user's reach. Relative input techniques, where users manipulate a cursor rather than touching objects directly, allow users to reach all areas of the table. However, the only available awareness information comes from the virtual embodiment of the user (e.g., their cursor). This presents designers with a tradeoff: direct-touch techniques have advantages for group awareness; relative input techniques offer additional power but less awareness information. In this paper, we explore this tradeoff, and we explore the design space of virtual embodiments to determine whether factors such as size, realism, and visibility can improve awareness and coordination. We conducted a study in which seven groups carried out a picture-categorizing task using seven techniques: direct touch and relative input with six different virtual embodiments. Our results provide both valuable information to designers of tabletop groupware, and a number of new directions for future research.”
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Mandryk, Regan L. and Gutwin, Carl (2008): Perceptibility and Utility of Sticky Targets. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Graphics Interface May 28-30, 2008, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. pp. 65-72.
“Researchers have suggested that dynamically increasing control-to-display (CD) gain can assist in targeting, by increasing the effective width of targets in motor space, which makes targets feel sticky. Although this method has been shown to be effective, there are several unexplored issues that could affect its use in real-world interfaces. One of these is perceptibility: in particular, the difference between the perceptibility and the utility of the technique. If CD gain changes are highly noticeable even at levels that are not helpful, the technique could be seen as overly intrusive. If CD gain changes are more useful than noticeable, however, the technique could be applied more widely. To explore this issue, we carried out a study that tested both the utility and the perceptibility of CD gain in single-target selection tasks. We found that although even small amounts of gain reduction significantly improved targeting times, participants did not consistently notice the effect until the gain difference was much higher. Our results provide new understanding of how changes in CD gain are experienced by users, and provide initial evidence to suggest that sticky targets can benefit users without a high perceptual cost.”
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Stuckel, Dane and Gutwin, Carl (2008): The effects of local lag on tightly-coupled interaction in distributed groupware. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 447-456. Available online
“Tightly-coupled interaction is shared work in which each person's actions immediately and continuously influence the actions of others. Tightly-coupled collaboration is a hallmark of expert behavior in face-to-face activity, but becomes extremely difficult to accomplish over distributed groupware. The main cause of this difficulty is network delay that disrupts people's ability to synchronize their actions with another person. In this paper we report on two studies that explore local lag as a way of reducing this problem. When applied to visual feedback, local lag synchronizes the visual environments of the local and remote clients, preventing one person from getting ahead of the other. We tested the effects of local lag in several delay conditions: we found that the technique significantly improved performance, and that users did not rate local lag as more difficult or frustrating to use. Our studies improve our understanding of local lag and of how it improves tightly-coupled interaction in distributed groupware.”
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Bateman, Scott, Gutwin, Carl and Nacenta, Miguel A. (2008): Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 2008. pp. 193-202. Available online
“Tag clouds are a popular method for visualizing and linking socially-organized information on websites. Tag clouds represent variables of interest (such as popularity) in the visual appearance of the keywords themselves -- using text properties such as font size, weight, or colour. Although tag clouds are becoming common, there is still little information about which visual features of tags draw the attention of viewers. As tag clouds attempt to represent a wider range of variables with a wider range of visual properties, it becomes difficult to predict what will appear visually important to a viewer. To investigate this issue, we carried out an exploratory study that asked users to select tags from clouds that manipulated nine visual properties. Our results show that font size and font weight have stronger effects than intensity, number of characters, or tag area; but when several visual properties are manipulated at once, there is no one property that stands out above the others. This study adds to the understanding of how visual properties of text capture the attention of users, indicates general guidelines for designers of tag clouds, and provides a study paradigm and starting points for future studies. In addition, our findings may be applied more generally to the visual presentation of textual hyperlinks as a way to provide more information to web navigators.”
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Pinelle, David, Stach, Tadeusz and Gutwin, Carl (2008): TableTrays: Temporary, reconfigurable work surfaces for tabletop groupware. In: Third IEEE International Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Tabletop 2008 October 1-3, 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 41-48. Available online
Liu, Jun, Pinelle, David, Gutwin, Carl and Subramanian, Sriram (2008): Improving digital handoff in shared tabletop workspaces. In: Third IEEE International Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Tabletop 2008 October 1-3, 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 9-16. Available online
Block, Florian, Gutwin, Carl, Haller, Michael, Gellersen, Hans and Billinghurst, Mark (2008): Pen and paper techniques for physical customisation of tabletop interfaces. In: Third IEEE International Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Tabletop 2008 October 1-3, 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 17-24. Available online
Pinelle, David and Gutwin, Carl (2008): Evaluating teamwork support in tabletop groupware applications using collaboration usability analysis. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (3) pp. 237-254
Block, Florian, Haller, Michael, Gellersen, Hans, Gutwin, Carl and Billinghurst, Mark (2008): VoodooSketch: extending interactive surfaces with adaptable interface palettes. In: Schmidt, Albrecht, Gellersen, Hans, Hoven, Elise van den, Mazalek, Ali, Holleis, Paul and Villar, Nicolas (eds.) TEI 2008 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction February 18-20, 2008, Bonn, Germany. pp. 55-58. Available online
Quinn, Philip, Cockburn, Andy and Gutwin, Carl (2008): An investigation of dynamic landmarking functions. In: Levialdi, Stefano (ed.) AVI 2008 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces May 28-30, 2008, Napoli, Italy. pp. 322-325. Available online
Vassileva, Julita and Gutwin, Carl (2008): Exploring blog archives with interactive visualization. In: Levialdi, Stefano (ed.) AVI 2008 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces May 28-30, 2008, Napoli, Italy. pp. 39-46. Available online
» 2007 «
Stach, Tadeusz, Gutwin, Carl, Pinelle, David and Irani, Pourang (2007): Improving recognition and characterization in groupware with rich embodiments. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 11-20. Available online
“Embodiments are visual representations of people in a groupware system. Embodiments convey awareness information such as presence, location, and movement -- but they provide far less information than what is available from a real body in a face-to-face setting. As a result, it is often difficult to recognize and characterize other people in a groupware system without extensive communication. To address this problem, information-rich embodiments use ideas from multivariate information visualization to maximize the amount of information that is represented about a person. To investigate the feasibility of rich embodiment and their effects on group interaction, we carried out three studies. The first shows that users are able to recall and interpret a large set of variables that are graphically encoded on an embodiment. The second and third studies demonstrated rich embodiments in two groupware systems -- a multiplayer game and a drawing application -- and showed that the enhanced representations do improve recognition and characterization, and that they can enrich interaction in a variety of ways.”
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Shoemaker, Garth B. D. and Gutwin, Carl (2007): Supporting multi-point interaction in visual workspaces. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 999-1008. Available online
“Multi-point interaction tasks involve the manipulation of several mutually-dependent control points in a visual workspace -- for example, adjusting a selection rectangle in a drawing application. Multi-point interactions place conflicting requirements on the interface: the system must display objects at sufficient scale for detailed manipulation, but it must also provide an efficient means of navigating from one control point to another. Current interfaces lack any explicit support for tasks that combine these two requirements, forcing users to carry out sequences of zoom and pan actions. In this paper, we describe three novel mechanisms for view control that explicitly support multi-point interactions with a single mouse, and preserve both visibility and scale for multiple regions of interest. We carried out a study to compare two of the designs against standard zoom and pan techniques, and found that task completion time was significantly reduced with the new approaches. The study shows the potential of interfaces that combine support for both scale and navigation.”
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Shanmugasundaram, Maruthappan, Irani, Pourang and Gutwin, Carl (2007): Can smooth view transitions facilitate perceptual constancy in node-link diagrams?. In: Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Graphics Interface 2007. pp. 71-78. Available online
“Many visualizations use smoothly animated transitions to help the user interact with information structures. These transitions are intended to preserve perceptual constancy during viewpoint transformations. However, animated transitions also have costs -- they increase the transition time, and they can be complicated to implement -- and it is not clear whether the benefits of smooth transitions outweigh the costs. In order to quantify these benefits, we carried out two experiments that explore the effects of smooth transitions. In the first study, subjects were asked to determine whether graph nodes were connected, and navigated the graph either with or without smooth scene transitions. In the second study, participants were asked to identify the overall structure of a tree after navigating the tree through a viewport that either did or did not use smooth transitions for view changes. The results of both experiments show that smooth transitions can have dramatic benefits for user performance -- for example, participants in smooth transition conditions made half the errors of the discrete-movement conditions. In addition, short transitions were found to be as effective as long ones, suggesting that some of the costs of animations can be avoided. These studies give empirical evidence on the benefits of smooth transitions, and provide guidelines about when designers should use them in visualization systems.”
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Nacenta, Miguel A., Pinelle, David, Stuckel, Dane and Gutwin, Carl (2007): The effects of interaction technique on coordination in tabletop groupware. In: Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Graphics Interface 2007. pp. 191-198. Available online
“The interaction techniques that are used in tabletop groupware systems (such as pick-and-drop or pantograph) can affect the way that people collaborate. However, little is known about these effects, making it difficult for designers to choose appropriate techniques when building tabletop groupware. We carried out an exploratory study to determine how several different types of interaction techniques (pantograph, telepointers, radar views, drag-and-drop, and laser beam) affected coordination and awareness in two tabletop tasks (a game and a storyboarding activity). We found that the choice of interaction technique significantly affected coordination measures, performance measures, and preference -- but that the effects were different for the two different tasks. Our study shows that the choice of tabletop interaction technique does indeed matter, and provides insight into how tabletop systems can better support group work.”
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Birnholtz, Jeremy P., Gutwin, Carl and Hawkey, Kirstie (2007): Privacy in the open: how attention mediates awareness and privacy in open-plan offices. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 51-60. Available online
“The tension between privacy and awareness has been a persistent difficulty in distributed environments that support opportunistic and informal interaction. For example, many awareness systems that display 'always-on' video links or PC screen contents have been perceived as too invasive, even though functional real-world analogues, like open-plan offices, may provide even less privacy than their online counterparts. In this paper we explore the notion of privacy in open-plan real-world environments, in order to learn more about how it might be supported in distributed systems. From interviews and observations in four open-plan offices, we found that attention plays an important role in the management of both confidentiality and solitude. The public nature of paying attention allows people to build understandings of what objects in a space are legitimate targets for attention and allows people to advertise their interest in interaction. Our results add to what is known about how privacy works in real-world spaces, and suggest valuable design ideas that can help improve support for natural privacy control and interaction in distributed awareness systems.”
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Kim, Hyun Hoi James, Gutwin, Carl and Subramanian, Sriram (2007): The magic window: lessons from a year in the life of a co-present media space. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 107-116. Available online
“The windows and doorways that connect offices to public spaces are a site for people to gather awareness information and initiate interaction. However, these portals often reveal more information to the public area than the office occupant would like. As a result, people often keep doors and window blinds closed, which means that nobody can gather awareness information, even those with whom the occupant would be willing to share. One solution to this problem is a co-present media space -- a computer-mediated video connection at the boundary between an office and a public area. These systems can provide both greater privacy control to the occupant and greater overall awareness information to observers. To see how co-present media spaces would work in real world settings, we built what we believe are the first ever co-present media spaces, and deployed them in two offices. From observations gathered over fifteen months, it is clear that the systems can do a better job of balancing the occupant's need for privacy and the observers' need for awareness better, than a standard window. However, we also identified a number of issues that affected the use and the success of the systems: the existence of alternate information sources, confusion with existing social norms, disparities between effort and need, and reduced interactional subtlety for observers in the public area. Our work contributes both a novel arrangement of a media space for co-present collaborators, and the first investigation into the design factors that affect the use and acceptance of these systems.”
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Dyck, Jeff, Gutwin, Carl, Graham, T. C. Nicholas and Pinelle, David (2007): Beyond the lan: techniques from network games for improving groupware performance. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 291-300. Available online
“Networked games can provide groupware developers with important lessons in how to deal with real-world networking issues such as latency, limited bandwidth and packet loss. Games have similar demands and characteristics to groupware, but unlike the applications studied by academics, games have provided production-quality real-time interaction for many years. The techniques used by games have not traditionally been made public, but several game networking libraries have recently been released as open source, providing the opportunity to learn how games achieve network performance. We examined five game libraries to find networking techniques that could benefit groupware; this paper presents the concepts most valuable to groupware developers, including techniques to deal with limited bandwidth, reliability, and latency. Some of the techniques have been previously reported in the networking literature; therefore, the contribution of this paper is to survey which techniques have been shown to work, over several years, and then to link these techniques to quality requirements specific to groupware. By adopting these techniques, groupware designers can dramatically improve network performance on the real-world Internet.”
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Nacenta, Miguel A., Sakurai, Satoshi, Yamaguchi, Tokuo, Miki, Yohei, Itoh, Yuichi, Kitamura, Yoshifumi, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2007): E-conic: a perspective-aware interface for multi-display environments. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology October 7-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. pp. 279-288. Available online
“Multi-display environments compose displays that can be at different locations from and different angles to the user; as a result, it can become very difficult to manage windows, read text, and manipulate objects. We investigate the idea of perspective as a way to solve these problems in multi-display environments. We first identify basic display and control factors that are affected by perspective, such as visibility, fracture, and sharing. We then present the design and implementation of E-conic, a multi-display multi-user environment that uses location data about displays and users to dynamically correct perspective. We carried out a controlled experiment to test the benefits of perspective correction in basic interaction tasks like targeting, steering, aligning, pattern-matching and reading. Our results show that perspective correction significantly and substantially improves user performance in all these tasks.”
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Nunes, Michael, Greenberg, Saul, Carpendale, Sheelagh and Gutwin, Carl (2007): What Did I Miss? Visualizing the Past through Video Traces. In: Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2007. pp. 1-20. Available online
“Always-on media spaces broadcast video between collaborators to provide mutual awareness and to encourage casual interaction. This video can be easily recorded on the fly as a video trace. Ostensibly, people can review this video history to gain a better idea of the activities and availability of their collaborators. Such systems are obviously highly contentious, as they raise significant privacy concerns. However, the ease of capturing video means that video trace systems will appear in the near future. To push the boundaries and encourage debate about video trace technologies within the CSCW community, we created TIMELINE, a highly effective visualization system that combines ideas in slit scanning as used in interactive art to allow people to easily and rapidly explore a video history in detail. We describe its design and implementation, and begin the debate by offering preliminary reflections on how it can be used and misused. To encourage this debate, TIMELINE is freely available for others to try.”
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Irani, Pourang, Gutwin, Carl, Partridge, Grant and Nezhadasl, Mahtab (2007): Techniques for Interacting with Off-Screen Content. In: Baranauskas, Maria Cecília Calani, Palanque, Philippe A., Abascal, Julio and Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira (eds.) DEGAS 2007 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Design and Evaluation of e-Government Applications and Services September 11th, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp. 234-249. Available online
Partridge, Grant, Nezhadasl, Mahtab, Irani, Pourang and Gutwin, Carl (2007): A Comparison of Navigation Techniques Across Different Types of Off-Screen Navigation Tasks. In: Baranauskas, Maria Cecília Calani, Palanque, Philippe A., Abascal, Julio and Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira (eds.) DEGAS 2007 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Design and Evaluation of e-Government Applications and Services September 11th, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp. 716-721. Available online
» 2006 «
Cockburn, Andy, Gutwin, Carl and Alexander, Jason (2006): Faster document navigation with space-filling thumbnails. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 1-10. Available online
“Scrolling is the standard way to navigate through many types of digital documents. However, moving more than a few pages can be slow because all scrolling techniques constrain visual search to only a small document region. To improve document navigation, we developed Space-Filling Thumbnails (SFT), an overview display that eliminates most scrolling. SFT provides two views: a standard page view for reading, and a thumbnail view that shows all pages. We tested SFT in three experiments that involved finding pages in documents. The first study (n=13) compared seven current scrolling techniques, and showed that SFT is significantly faster than the other methods. The second and third studies (n=32 and n=14) were detailed comparisons of SFT with thumbnail-enhanced scrollbars (TES), which performed well in the first experiment. SFT was faster than TES across all document types and lengths, particularly when tasks involved revisitation. In addition, SFT was strongly preferred by participants.”
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Nacenta, Miguel A., Sallam, Samer, Champoux, Bernard, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2006): Perspective cursor: perspective-based interaction for multi-display environments. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 289-298. Available online
“Multi-display environments and smart meeting rooms are now becoming more common. These environments build a shared display space from variety of devices: tablets, projected surfaces, tabletops, and traditional monitors. Since the different display surfaces are usually not organized in a single plane, traditional schemes for stitching the displays together can cause problems for interaction. However, there is a more natural way to compose display space -- using perspective. In this paper, we develop interaction techniques for multi-display environments that are based on the user's perspective on the room. We designed the Perspective Cursor, a mapping of cursor to display space that appears natural and logical from wherever the user is located. We conducted an experiment to compare two perspective-based techniques, the Perspective Cursor and a beam-based technique, with traditional stitched displays. We found that both perspective techniques were significantly faster for targeting tasks than the traditional technique, and that Perspective Cursor was the most preferred method. Our results show that integrating perspective into the design of multi-display environments can substantially improve performance.”
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Irani, Pourang, Gutwin, Carl and Yang, Xing Dong (2006): Improving selection of off-screen targets with hopping. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 299-308. Available online
“Many systems provide the user with a limited viewport of a larger graphical workspace. In these systems, the user often needs to find and select targets that are in the workspace, but not visible in the current view. Standard methods for navigating to the off-screen targets include scrolling, panning, and zooming; however, these are laborious when users cannot see a target's direction or distance. Techniques such as halos can provide awareness of targets, but actually getting to the target is still slow with standard navigation. To improve off-screen target selection, we developed a new technique called hop, which combines halos with a teleportation mechanism that shows proxies of distant objects. Hop provides both awareness of off-screen targets and fast navigation to the target context. A study showed that users are significantly faster at selecting off-screen targets with hopping than with two-level zooming or grab-and-drag panning, and it is clear that hop will be faster than either halos or proxy-based techniques (like drag-and-pop or vacuum filtering) by themselves. Hop both improves on halo-based navigation and extends the value of proxies to small-screen environments.”
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Tee, Kimberly, Greenberg, Saul and Gutwin, Carl (2006): Providing artifact awareness to a distributed group through screen sharing. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW06 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2006. pp. 99-108. Available online
“Despite the availability of awareness servers and casual interaction systems, distributed groups still cannot maintain artifact awareness -- the easy awareness of the documents, objects, and tools that other people are using -- that is a natural part of co-located work environments. To address this deficiency, we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to provide information about other people's artifacts. People see others' screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively raise a larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can engage in remote pointing if desired. Initial experiences show that people use our tool for several purposes: to maintain awareness of what others are doing, to project a certain image of themselves, to monitor progress and coordinate joint tasks, to help determine when another person can be interrupted, and to engage in serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People also balance awareness with privacy by using several privacy protection strategies built into our system.”
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Gutwin, Carl, Fedak, Christopher, Watson, Mark, Dyck, Jeff and Bell, Tim (2006): Improving network efficiency in real-time groupware with general message compression. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW06 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2006. pp. 119-128. Available online
“Groupware communicates by sending messages across the network, and groupware programmers use a variety of formats for these messages, such as XML, plain text, or serialized objects. Although these formats have many advantages, they are often so verbose that they overload the system's network resources. Groupware programmers could improve efficiency by using more compact formats, but this efficiency comes at the cost of increased complexity, reduced convenience, and reduced readability. In this paper we propose an alternate approach for improving efficiency -- an automatic compression system that transparently minimizes verbose formats. Our general message compressor -- GMC -- automatically finds and removes redundancy in message streams, without any knowledge of the contents or structure of the message, and without any need for the programmer to change the way they work. In tests with realistic message traces, GMC reduced text messages to 20% of their original size, XML messages”
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Gates, Carrie, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2006): DJs' perspectives on interaction and awareness in nightclubs. In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. 70-79. Available online
“Several researchers have recently proposed technology for crowd-and-DJ interactions in nightclub environments. However, these attempts have not always met with success. In order to design better technologies and systems in this area, it is important to start with an understanding of how nightclub interaction currently happens. To build this understanding, we carried out an interview study focusing on DJ-audience interactions. We interviewed eleven DJs from several different cities, and asked them to discuss the ways that they interact with the audience, and the ways that they maintain and use awareness of the audience. We found that DJs gather a wide variety of information about their audiences, and that this information is important to them as they plan and shape the evening's musical experience. DJs are adept at gathering visual information about the audience, despite poor lighting conditions and a heavy workload of selecting and mixing music. Despite the difficulties, DJs took a dim view of technology designed to let crowds exert more control over the music. This study is one of the first to look closely at the interactive relationship between the DJ and the nightclub audience through the lens of HCI, and our findings provide a number of guidelines for the design of new DJ-focused nightclub technologies.”
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Liu, Jun, Pinelle, David, Sallam, Samer, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2006): TNT: improved rotation and translation on digital tables. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Graphics Interface 2006. pp. 25-32. Available online
“Digital tabletop systems allow users to work on computational objects in a flexible and natural setting. Since users can easily move to different positions around a table, systems must allow people to orient artifacts to their current position. However, it is only recently that rotation and translation techniques have been specifically designed for tabletops, and existing techniques still do not feel as simple and efficient as their real-world counterparts. To address this problem, we studied the ways that people move and reorient sheets of paper on real-world tabletops. We found that in almost all cases, rotation and translation are carried out simultaneously, and that an open-palm hand position was the most common way to carry out the motion. Based on our observations, we designed a new set of reorientation techniques that more closely parallel real-world motions. The new techniques, collectively called TNT, use three-degree-of-freedom (3DOF) input to allow simultaneous rotation and translation. A user study showed that all three variants of TNT were faster than a recent technique called RNT; in addition, participants strongly preferred TNT.”
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Reetz, Adrian, Gutwin, Carl, Stach, Tadeusz, Nacenta, Miguel A. and Subramanian, Sriram (2006): Superflick: a natural and efficient technique for long-distance object placement on digital tables. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Graphics Interface 2006. pp. 163-170. Available online
“Moving objects past arms' reach is a common action in both real-world and digital tabletops. In the real world, the most common way to accomplish this task is by throwing or sliding the object across the table. Sliding is natural, easy to do, and fast: however, in digital tabletops, few existing techniques for long-distance movement bear any resemblance to these real-world motions. We have designed and evaluated two tabletop interaction techniques that closely mimic the action of sliding an object across the table. Flick is an open-loop technique that is extremely fast. Superflick is based on Flick, but adds a correction step to improve accuracy for small targets. We carried out two user studies to compare these techniques to a fast and accurate proxy-based technique, the radar view. In the first study, we found that Flick is significantly faster than the radar for large targets, but is inaccurate for small targets. In the second study, we found no differences between Superflick and radar for either time or accuracy. Given the simplicity and learnability of flicking, our results suggest that throwing-based techniques have promise for improving the usability of digital tables.”
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Pinelle, David and Gutwin, Carl (2006): Loose Coupling and Healthcare Organizations: Deployment Strategies for Groupware. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 15 (5) pp. 537-572
“Healthcare organizations are often organized in a modular, loosely coupled fashion where separate and semi-autonomous work units specialize in different areas of care delivery. This partitioning allows each unit to adapt to emerging practice standards in its area of expertise and to adjust to its local work environment. However, organizational loose coupling can limit the flow of information within organizations and can make it difficult to coordinate services when patients' care is dependent on professionals from more than one unit. Groupware systems have the potential to improve coordination and information access in healthcare organizations. However, modularity and loose coupling make it difficult to introduce new systems when they span more than one unit, since authority is not always centralized and since perceptions and frames of reference on new deployments differ across units. In this paper, we define a groupware deployment framework for loosely coupled healthcare organizations that has two parts: a set of deployment challenges and a set of deployment strategies. The deployment challenges include: difficulties centralizing deployments, perceptions of inequity, role conflicts, and problems achieving critical mass. The deployment strategies outline a preliminary set of approaches for addressing the difficulties of deploying CSCW systems in loosely coupled healthcare organizations. We illustrate the framework by presenting a case study of a groupware deployment in a home care setting.”
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Gates, Carrie, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2006): DJs' perspectives on interaction and awareness in nightclubs. In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. 70-79. Available online
“Several researchers have recently proposed technology for crowd-and-DJ interactions in nightclub environments. However, these attempts have not always met with success. In order to design better technologies and systems in this area, it is important to start with an understanding of how nightclub interaction currently happens. To build this understanding, we carried out an interview study focusing on DJ-audience interactions. We interviewed eleven DJs from several different cities, and asked them to discuss the ways that they interact with the audience, and the ways that they maintain and use awareness of the audience. We found that DJs gather a wide variety of information about their audiences, and that this information is important to them as they plan and shape the evening's musical experience. DJs are adept at gathering visual information about the audience, despite poor lighting conditions and a heavy workload of selecting and mixing music. Despite the difficulties, DJs took a dim view of technology designed to let crowds exert more control over the music. This study is one of the first to look closely at the interactive relationship between the DJ and the nightclub audience through the lens of HCI, and our findings provide a number of guidelines for the design of new DJ-focused nightclub technologies.”
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Aliakseyeu, Dzmitry, Nacenta, Miguel A., Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2006): Bubble radar: efficient pen-based interaction. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 19-26. Available online
Aliakseyeu, Dzmitry, Subramanian, Sriram, Lucero, Andres and Gutwin, Carl (2006): Interacting with piles of artifacts on digital tables. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 159-162. Available online
Gutwin, Carl and Cockburn, Andy (2006): Improving list revisitation with ListMaps. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 396-403. Available online
» 2005 «
Davis, Scott and Gutwin, Carl (2005): Using relationship to control disclosure in Awareness servers. In: Graphics Interface 2005 May 9-11, 2005, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. pp. 145-152. Available online
“Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether they are available for contact. A tradeoff exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve people's decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this paper, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this tradeoff. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We also found that the only relationship to consistently receive less information was the acquaintance -- essentially the person without a strong relationship at all. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finer-grained control than what is currently available.”
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Gutwin, Carl (2005): Book Review: Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies, Kenton O'Hara, Mark Perry, Elizabeth Churchill and Daniel Russell (eds.), The Kluwer International Series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, . In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14 (3) pp. 287-291
Nacenta, Miguel A., Aliakseyeu, Dzmitry, Subramanian, Sriram and Gutwin, Carl (2005): A comparison of techniques for multi-display reaching. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 371-380. Available online
“Recent advances in multi-user collaboration have seen a proliferation of interaction techniques for moving digital objects from one device to another. However, little is known about how these techniques work in realistic situations, or how they compare to one another. We conducted a study to compare the efficiency of six techniques for moving objects from a tablet to a tabletop display. We compared the techniques in four different distance ranges and with three movement directions. We found that techniques like the Radar View and Pick-and-Drop, that have a control-to-display ratio of 1, are significantly faster for object movement than techniques that have smaller control-to-display ratios. We also found that using spatial manipulation of objects was faster than pressure-based manipulation.”
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Skopik, Amy and Gutwin, Carl (2005): Improving revisitation in fisheye views with visit wear. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 771-780. Available online
“The distortion caused by an interactive fisheye lens can make it difficult for people to remember items and locations in the data space. In this paper we introduce the idea of visit wear - a visual representation of the places that the user has previously visited - as a way to improve navigation in spaces affected by distortion. We outline the design dimensions of visit wear, and report on two studies. The first shows that increasing the distortion of a fisheye view does significantly reduce people's ability to remember object locations. The second study looks at the effects of visit wear on performance in revisitation tasks, and shows that both completion time and error rates are significantly improved when visit wear is present. Visit wear works by changing the revisitation problem from one of memory to one of visual search. Although there are limitations to the technique, visit wear has the potential to substantially improve the usability both of fisheye views and of graphical information spaces more generally.”
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Chiasson, Sonia and Gutwin, Carl (2005): Testing the media equation with children. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 829-838. Available online
“Designers of children's technology are often more interested in user motivation than those who design systems for adults. Since children's technology often has aims such as education or practice, keeping the user engaged and interested is an important objective. The Media Equation - the idea that people respond socially to computers - shows potential for improving engagement and motivation. Studies have shown that people are more positive about both themselves and the computer when software exhibits certain social characteristics. To explore the possible value of the Media Equation as a design concept for children's software, we replicated two of the original Media Equation studies, concerning the effects of praise and team formation. Our results, however, were contrary to our expectations: we did not find evidence that children were significantly affected by social characteristics in software, and adults were influenced in only a few cases. These results raise questions about using the Media Equation as a design principle for children's software.”
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Gutwin, Carl, Schneider, Kevin A., Paquette, David and Penner, Reagan (2005): Supporting Group Awareness in Distributed Software Development. In: Bastide, Remi, Palanque, Philippe A. and Roth, Jörg (eds.) Engineering Human Computer Interaction and Interactive Systems, Joint Working Conferences EHCI-DSVIS 2004 July 11-13, 2005, Hamburg, Germany. pp. 383-397. Available online
Levy, Stephen E. and Gutwin, Carl (2005): Improving understanding of website privacy policies with fine-grained policy anchors. In: Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2005. pp. 480-488. Available online
“Website privacy policies state the ways that a site will use personal identifiable information (PII) that is collected from fields and forms in web-based transactions. Since these policies can be complex, machine-readable versions have been developed that allow automatic comparison of a site's privacy policy with a user's privacy preferences. However, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of conformance conflicts, because current standards operate at the page level -- they can only say that there is a conflict on the page, not where the conflict occurs or what causes it. In this paper we describe fine-grained policy anchors, an extension to the way a website implements the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), that solves this problem. Fine grained policy anchors enable field-level comparisons of policy and preference, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional conformance information. We built a prototype user agent based on these extensions and tested it with representative users. We found that fine-grained anchors do help users understand how privacy policy relates to their privacy preferences, and where and why conformance conflicts occur.”
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» 2004 «
Baudisch, Patrick and Gutwin, Carl (2004): Multiblending: displaying overlapping windows simultaneously without the drawbacks of alpha blending. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 367-374. Available online
“Alpha blending allows the simultaneous display of overlapping windows-such as palette windows in visual workspaces. Although alpha blending has been used in some applications, such as games, it has not been widely adopted. One reason for the limited acceptance is that in many scenarios, alpha blending compromises the readability of content. We introduce a new blending mechanism called multiblending that uses a vector of blending weights, one for each class of features, rather than a single transparency value. Multiblending can in most cases be automatically optimized to preserve the most relevant features of both the palette and the background window. We present the results of a user study in which multiblended palettes provided higher recognizability of both the background and the palette than the best participating version of alpha blending.”
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Gutwin, Carl, Benford, Steve, Dyck, Jeff, Fraser, Mike, Vaghi, Ivan and Greenhalgh, Chris (2004): Revealing delay in collaborative environments. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 503-510. Available online
“Delay is an unavoidable reality in collaborative environments. We propose an approach to dealing with delay in which 'decorators' are introduced into the interface. Decorators show the presence, magnitude and effects of delay so that participants can better understand its consequences and adopt their own natural coping strategies. Two experiments with different decorators show that this approach can significantly reduce errors in specific collaborative activities. We conclude that revealing delays is one way in which groupware can benefit from accepting and working with the reality of distributed systems, rather than trying to maintain the illusion of copresent interaction.”
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Gutwin, Carl, Penner, Reagan and Schneider, Kevin (2004): Group awareness in distributed software development. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 72-81. Available online
“Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.”
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Dyck, Jeff, Gutwin, Carl, Subramanian, Sriram and Fedak, Christopher (2004): High-performance telepointers. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 172-181. Available online
“Although telepointers are valuable for supporting real-time collaboration, they are rarely seen in commercial groupware applications that run on the Internet. One reason for their absence is that current telepointer implementations perform poorly on real-world networks with varying traffic, congestion, and loss. In this paper, we report on a new implementation of telepointers (HPT) that is designed to provide smooth, timely, and accurate telepointers in real-world groupware: on busy networks, on cable and dialup connections, and on wireless channels. HPT maintains performance at usable levels with a combination of techniques from multimedia and distributed systems research, including UDP transport, message compression, motion prediction, adaptive rate control, and adaptive forward error correction. Although these techniques have been seen before, they have never been combined and tailored to the specific requirements of telepointers. Tests of the new implementation show that HPT provides good performance in a number of network situations where other implementations do not work at all - we can provide usable telepointers even over a lossy 28K modem connection. HPT sets a new standard for telepointers, and allows designers to greatly improve the support that groupware provides for real-time interaction over distance.”
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Mould, David and Gutwin, Carl (2004): The effects of feedback on targeting with multiple moving targets. In: Graphics Interface 2004 May 17-19, 2004, London, Ontario, Canada. pp. 25-32. Available online
“A number of task settings involve selection of objects from dynamic visual environments with multiple moving targets. Target selection is difficult in these settings because objects move, because there are a number of distracter objects for any targeting action, and because objects can occlude the target. Target feedback has been suggested as a way to assist targeting in visual environments. We carried out an experiment to test the effects of visual target feedback. We found that targeting does become more difficult as the number and speed of objects increases, and that feedback can improve error rates. When feedback was provided on all objects in the space, performance improved significantly over no feedback. Target-only feedback, however, was not significantly better than no feedback. This is a valuable result because all-object feedback is in most cases the only implementation option -- since it is usually not possible to pre-determine the user's target among the set of objects.”
Copyrights may apply
Gutwin, Carl and Fedak, Chris (2004): Interacting with big interfaces on small screens: a comparison of fisheye, zoom, and panning techniques. In: Graphics Interface 2004 May 17-19, 2004, London, Ontario, Canada. pp. 145-152. Available online
“Mobile devices with small screens are becoming more common, and will soon be powerful enough to run desktop software. However, the large interfaces of desktop applications do not fit on the small screens. Although there are ways to redesign a UI to fit a smaller area, there are many cases where the only solution is to navigate the large UI with the small screen. The best way to do this, however, is not known. We compared three techniques for using large interfaces on small screens: a panning system similar to what is in current use, a two-level zoom system, and a fisheye view. We tested the techniques with three realistic tasks. We found that people were able to carry out a web navigation task significantly faster with the fisheye view, that the two-level zoom was significantly better for a monitoring task, and that people were slowest with the panning system.”
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Gutwin, Carl and Fedak, Chris (2004): A comparison of fisheye lenses for interactive layout tasks. In: Graphics Interface 2004 May 17-19, 2004, London, Ontario, Canada. pp. 213-220. Available online
“Interactive fisheye views allow users to edit data and manipulate objects through the distortion lens. Although several varieties of fisheye lens exist, little is known about how the different types fare for different interactive tasks. In this paper, we investigate one kind of interaction -- layout of graphical objects -- that can be problematic in fisheyes. Layout involves judgments of distance, alignment, and angle, all of which can be adversely affected by the distortion of a fisheye. We compared performance on layout tasks with three kinds of fisheye: a full-screen pyramid lens, a constrained hemispherical lens, and a constrained flat-topped hemisphere. We found that accuracy was significantly better with the constrained lenses compared to the full-screen lens, and also that the simple hemisphere was better at higher levels of distortion than the flat-topped version. The study shows that although there is a cost to doing layout through distortion, it is feasible, particularly with constrained lenses. In addition, our findings provide initial empirical evidence of the differences between competing fisheye varieties.”
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Hill, Jason and Gutwin, Carl (2004): The MAUI Toolkit: Groupware Widgets for Group Awareness. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (5) pp. 539-571
“Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the Multi-User Awareness UI toolkit (MAUI) toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.”
Copyrights may apply
Pinelle, David, Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Collaboration usability analysis: task analysis for groupware usability evaluations. In Interactions, 11 (2) pp. 7-8
» 2003 «
Gutwin, Carl and Skopik, Amy (2003): Fisheyes are good for large steering tasks. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 201-208.
Pinelle, David, Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2003): Task analysis for groupware usability evaluation: Modeling shared-workspace tasks with the mechanics of collaboration. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 10 (4) pp. 281-311
“Researchers in Computer Supported Cooperative Work have recently developed discount evaluation methods for shared-workspace groupware. Most discount methods rely on some understanding of the context in which the groupware systems will be used, which means that evaluators need to model the tasks that groups will perform. However, existing task analysis schemes are not well suited to the needs of groupware evaluation: they either do not deal with collaboration issues, do not use an appropriate level of analysis for concrete assessment of usability in interfaces, or do not adequately represent the variability inherent in group work. To fill this gap, we have developed a new modeling technique called Collaboration Usability Analysis. CUA focuses on the teamwork that goes on in a group task rather than the taskwork. To enable closer links between the task representation and the groupware interface, CUA grounds each collaborative action in a set of group work primitives called the mechanics of collaboration. To represent the range of ways that a group task can be carried out, CUA allows variable paths through the execution of a task, and allows alternate paths and optional tasks to be modeled. CUA's main contribution is to provide evaluators with a framework in which they can simulate the realistic use of a groupware system and identify usability problems that are caused by the groupware interface.”
Copyrights may apply
Pinelle, David and Gutwin, Carl (2003): Designing for loose coupling in mobile groups. In: Tremaine, Marilyn and Simone, Carla (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2003 November 9-12, 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 75-84. Available online
“Loose coupling is a common way of organizing collaboration in work groups, but it has not been studied extensively in CSCW. In this paper, we consider the patterns of work that are seen in mobile groups that adopt a loosely coupled collaboration style. We report findings from interviews and fieldwork with teams of workers who deliver home healthcare services. In these teams, workers are mobile, widely dispersed, and autonomous, and team members communicate with each other only intermittently. Based on these findings, we identify and discuss four work patterns that occur in loosely coupled mobility: discretionary collaboration and effort thresholds, implicitly shared information, asynchronous communication and coordination, and barriers to synchrony. We consider the implications of these findings for the design of CSCW technologies.”
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Hill, Jason and Gutwin, Carl (2003): Awareness support in a groupware widget toolkit. In: Tremaine, Marilyn and Simone, Carla (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2003 November 9-12, 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 258-267. Available online
“Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the MAUI toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.”
Copyrights may apply
Gutwin, Carl, Dyck, Jeff and Burkitt, Jennifer (2003): Using cursor prediction to smooth telepointer jitter. In: Tremaine, Marilyn and Simone, Carla (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2003 November 9-12, 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 294-301. Available online
“Telepointers are an important type of embodiment in real-time distributed groupware. Telepointers can increase the presence of remote participants and can provide considerable awareness information about people's locations and activities. However, the motion of a telepointer is often disrupted by network jitter. Although some strategies exist for dealing with jitter, none of these techniques are able to restore the immediacy and smoothness of a real cursor. In this paper we investigate the use of prediction -- commonly used in networked simulations and games -- to reduce the effects of jitter on telepointer motion. To determine whether prediction can be effective for improving telepointers, we carried out two experiments that tested the effects of different prediction schemes (some real and some artificial) on people's ability to interpret telepointer gestures. These studies show that although cursor prediction is still a difficult problem, there are both potential performance improvements, and definite preference advantages. Our studies suggest that telepointer prediction should be routinely used to increase the immediacy and naturalness of remote interaction, and suggest that prediction can also improve interpretation in certain situations.”
Copyrights may apply
Skopik, Amy and Gutwin, Carl (2003): Finding Things In Fisheyes: Memorability in Distorted Spaces. In: Graphics Interface 2003 June 11-13, 2003, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. pp. 47-56.
Gutwin, Carl, Dyck, Jeff and Fedak, Chris (2003): The Effects of Dynamic Transparency on Targeting Performance. In: Graphics Interface 2003 June 11-13, 2003, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. pp. 105-112.
Dyck, Jeff, Pinelle, David, Brown, Barry and Gutwin, Carl (2003): Learning from Games: HCI Design Innovations in Entertainment Software. In: Graphics Interface 2003 June 11-13, 2003, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. pp. 237-246.
Pinelle, David, Dyck, Jeff and Gutwin, Carl (2003): Aligning Work Practices and Mobile Technologies: Groupware Design for Loosely Coupled Mobile Groups. In: Chittaro, Luca (ed.) Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services - 5th International Symposium - Mobile HCI 2003 September 8-11, 2003, Udine, Italy. pp. 177-192. Available online
» 2002 «
Gutwin, Carl (2002): Improving focus targeting in interactive fisheye views. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 267-274.
Pinelle, David and Gutwin, Carl (2002): Groupware walkthrough: adding context to groupware usability evaluation. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 455-462.
Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2002): A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11 (3) pp. 411-446
“Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces -- tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware.”
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Gutwin, Carl and Penner, Reagan (2002): Improving interpretation of remote gestures with telepointer traces. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 49-57. Available online
“Gestural communication is an important part of shared work, both in
face-to-face settings and distributed environments. However, gestures in
groupware are often difficult to see and interpret because of disruptions to
their motion caused by network jitter. One way to improve the visibility of
remote gestures is by using traces-visualizations of the last few moments' of a
remote pointer's motion. We carried out an experiment to test the effectiveness
of traces in helping people interpret gestures. We found that telepointer
traces dramatically improved people's accuracy and confidence in their
decisions as jitter delays grew larger. Our results suggest that telepointer
traces and other visualizations of interaction history can be used to enrich
communication among remote collaborators.”
Copyrights may apply
Baker, Kevin, Greenberg, Saul and Gutwin, Carl (2002): Empirical development of a heuristic evaluation methodology for shared workspace groupware. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 96-105. Available online
“Good real time groupware products are hard to develop, in part because
evaluating their support for basic teamwork activities is difficult and costly.
To address this problem, we are developing discount evaluation methods that
look for groupware-specific usability problems. In a previous paper, we
detailed a new set of usability heuristics that evaluators can use to inspect
shared workspace groupware to see how they support teamwork. We wanted to
determine whether the new heuristics could be integrated into a low-cost
methodology that parallels Nielsen's traditional heuristic evaluation (HE). To
this end, we examined 27 evaluations of two shared workspace groupware systems
and analysed the inspectors' relative performance and variability. Similar to
Nielsen's findings for traditional HE, individual inspectors discovered about a
fifth of the total known teamwork problems, and that there was only modest
overlap in the problems they found. Groups of three to five inspectors would
report about 40-60% of the total known teamwork problems. These results suggest
that heuristic evaluation using our groupware heuristics can be an effective
and efficient method for identifying teamwork problems in shared workspace
groupware systems.”
Copyrights may apply
Gutwin, Carl (2002): Traces: Visualizing the Immediate Past to Support Group Interaction. In: Graphics Interface 2002 May 27-29, 2002, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. pp. 43-50.
» 2001 «
Steves, Michelle Potts, Morse, E., Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (2001): A comparison of usage evaluation and inspection methods for assessing groupware usability. In: Ellis, Clarence and Zigurs, Ilze (eds.) Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work 2001 September 30 - October 3, 2001, Boulder, Colorado, USA. pp. 125-134. Available online
“Many researchers believe that groupware can only be evaluated by studying real collaborators in their real contexts, a process that tends to be expensive and time-consuming. Others believe that it is more practical to evaluate groupware through usability inspection methods. Deciding between these two approaches is difficult, because it is unclear how they compare in a real evaluation situation. To address this problem, we carried out a dual evaluation of a groupware system, with one evaluation applying user-based techniques, and the other using inspection methods. We compared the results from the two evaluations and concluded that, while the two methods have their own strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs, they are complementary. Because the two methods found overlapping problems, we expect that they can be used in tandem to good effect, e.g., applying the discount method prior to a field study, with the expectation that the system deployed in the more expensive field study has a better chance of doing well because some pertinent usability problems will have already been addressed.”
Copyrights may apply
Gutwin, Carl (2001): The effects of network delays on group work in real-time groupware. In: Ecscw 2001 - Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 16-20 September, 2001, Bonn, Germany. pp. 299-318.
Baker, Kevin, Greenberg, Saul and Gutwin, Carl (2001): Heuristic Evaluation of Groupware Based on the Mechanics of Collaboration. In: Little, Murray Reed and Nigay, Laurence (eds.) EHCI 2001 - Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, 8th IFIP International Conference May 11-13, 2001, Toronto, Canada. pp. 123-140. Available online
» 2000 «
Fraser, Julie and Gutwin, Carl (2000): The Effects of Feedback on Targeting Performance in Visually Stressed Conditions. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000 May 15-17, 2000, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. pp. 19-26. Available online
Fraser, Julie and Gutwin, Carl (2000): A Framework of Assistive Pointers for Low Vision Users. In: Fourth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2000. pp. 9-16. Available online
“Manipulating a mouse pointer is often difficult for the low vision computer user. Working with such a small, mobile screen object is very visually demanding. Although several techniques have been used to address this problem, the design space of assistive pointers has not been fully explored by the current state of the art. This paper proposes a four dimensional framework to fully articulate the design space of assistive pointers for low vision users. The dimensions of the framework describe the key attributes of assistance offered to users by any pointing solution: the perceptual channel that carries the assistance, the stage of targeting supported by the assistance, the relationship between the assistance and the interface, and the degree of availability associated with the assistance.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1999 «
Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (1999): The Effects of Workspace Awareness Support on the Usability of Real-Time Distributed Groupware. In ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 6 (3) pp. 243-281
“Real-time collaboration in current distributed groupware workspaces is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness -- the understanding of who is in the workspace, where they are working, and what they are doing -- can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people's performance on two versions of a groupware interface. The interfaces used workspace miniatures to provide different levels of support for workspace awareness. The basic miniature showed information only about the local user, and the enhanced miniature showed the location and activity of other people in the workspace as well. We examined five aspects of groupware usability: task completion times, communication efficiency, the participants' perceived-effort, overall preference, and strategy use. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower in the awareness-enhanced system, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. The additional awareness information also allowed people to use different and more effective strategies to complete the tasks. Participants greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence that support for workspace awareness improves the usability of groupware, and uncovers some of the reasons underlying this improvement.”
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Witten, Ian H., Paynter, Gordon W., Frank, Eibe, Gutwin, Carl and Nevill-Manning, Craig G. (1999): KEA: Practical Automatic Keyphrase Extraction. In: DL99: Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries 1999. pp. 254-255. Available online
» 1998 «
Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (1998): Effects of Awareness Support on Groupware Usability. In: Karat, Clare-Marie, Lund, Arnold, Coutaz, Joëlle and Karat, John (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 98 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California. pp. 511-518. Available online
“Collaboration in current real-time groupware systems is often an awkward and clumsy process. We hypothesize that better support for workspace awareness can improve the usability of these shared computational workspaces. We conducted an experiment that compared people's performance on two versions of a groupware interface. The interfaces used workspace miniatures to provide different levels of support for workspace awareness. The basic miniature showed information only about the local user, and the enhanced miniature showed the location and activity of others in the workspace as well. In two of three task types tested, completion times were lower with increased awareness support, and in one task type, communication was more efficient. Participants also greatly preferred the awareness-enhanced system. The study provides empirical evidence of, and underlying reasons for, the value of supporting workspace awareness in groupware.”
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Gutwin, Carl and Greenberg, Saul (1998): Design for Individuals, Design for Groups: Tradeoffs between Power and Workspace Awareness. In: Poltrock, Steven and Grudin, Jonathan (eds.) Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 14 - 18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 207-216. Available online
“Users of synchronous groupware systems act both as individuals and as members of a group, and designers must try to support both roles. However, the requirements of individuals and groups often conflict, forcing designers to support one at the expense of the other. The tradeoff is particularly evident in the design of interaction techniques for shared workspaces. Individuals demand powerful and flexible means for interacting with the workspace and its artifacts, while groups require information about each other to maintain awareness. Although these conflicting requirements present real problems to designers, the tension can be reduced in some cases. We consider the tradeoff in three areas of groupware design: workspace navigation, artifact manipulation, and view representation. We show techniques such as multiple viewports, process feedthrough, action indicators, and view translations that support the needs of both individuals and groups.”
Copyrights may apply
McNab, Rodger, Wang, Yong, Witten, Ian H. and Gutwin, Carl (1998): Predicting Query Times. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 1998. pp. 355-356. Available online
“We outline the need for search engines to provide user feedback on the expected time for a query, describe a scheme for learning a model of query time by observing sample queries, and discuss the results obtained for a set of actual user queries on a document collection using the MG search engine.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1996 «
Gutwin, Carl, Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1996): A Usability Study of Awareness Widgets in a Shared Workspace Groupware System. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 258-267. Available online
“Workspace awareness is knowledge about others' interaction with a shared workspace. Groupware systems provide only limited information about other participants, often compromising workspace awareness. This paper describes a usability study of several widgets designed to help maintain awareness in groupware workspaces. These widgets included a miniature view, a radar view, a multi-user scrollbar, a glance function, and a "what you see is what I do" view. The study examined the widgets' information content, how easily people could interpret them, and whether they were distracting. Observations, questionnaires, and interviews indicate that the miniature and radar views are valuable for spatial manipulation tasks. The results also suggest new design requirements for awareness widgets: they should support both shared and individual work, provide familiar representations, and link perception and action.”
Copyrights may apply
Gutwin, Carl, Greenberg, Saul and Roseman, Mark (1996): Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware: Framework, Widgets, and Evaluation. In: Sasse, Martina Angela, Cunningham, R. J. and Winder, R. L. (eds.) Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers XI August, 1996, London, UK. pp. 281-298.
“The rich person-to-person interaction afforded by shared physical work-spaces allows people to maintain up-to-the minute knowledge about others' interaction with the task environment. This knowledge is workspace awareness, part of the glue that allows groups to collaborate effectively. In real-time groupware systems that provide a shared virtual space for collaboration, the possibilities for interaction are impoverished when compared with their physical counterparts. In this paper, we present the concept of workspace awareness as one key to supporting the richness evident in face-to-face interaction. We construct a conceptual framework that describes the elements and mechanisms of workspace awareness, and apply the framework to the design of widgets that help people maintain awareness in real-time distributed groupware. Our evaluation of these widgets has shown that several designs improve the usability of groupware applications.”
Copyrights may apply
Greenberg, Saul, Gutwin, Carl and Cockburn, Andy (1996): Using Distortion-Oriented Displays to Support Workspace Awareness. In: Sasse, Martina Angela, Cunningham, R. J. and Winder, R. L. (eds.) Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers XI August, 1996, London, UK. pp. 299-314.
“Desktop conferencing systems are now moving away from strict view-sharing and towards relaxed 'what you see is what I see' (relaxed-WYSIWIS) interfaces, where distributed participants in a real time session can view different parts of a shared visual workspace. As with strict view-sharing, people using relaxed-WYSIWIS require a sense of workspace awareness -- the up-to-the-minute knowledge about another person's interactions with the shared workspace. The problem is deciding how to provide a user with an appropriate level of awareness of what other participants are doing when they are working in different areas of the workspace. In this paper, we propose distortion-oriented displays as a novel way of providing this awareness. These displays, which employ magnification lenses and fisheye view techniques, show global context and local detail within a single window, providing both peripheral and detailed awareness of other participants' actions. Three prototypes are presented as examples of groupware distortion-oriented displays: the fisheye text viewer, the offset lens, and the head-up lens.”
Copyrights may apply
Greenberg, Saul, Gutwin, Carl and Cockburn, Andy (1996): Awareness through fisheye views in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware. In: Graphics Interface 96 May 22-24, 1996, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 28-38. Available online
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Mar 22nd, 2010
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