Saul Greenberg
Has also published under the name of:
"S. Greenberg"
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Publications by Saul Greenberg (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Voida, Amy and Greenberg, Saul (2009): Wii all play: the console game as a computational meeting place. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1559-1568. Available online
“In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of collocated group console gaming. We focus on motivations for, perceptions of, and practices surrounding the shared use of console games by a variety of established groups of gamers. These groups include both intragenerational groups of youth, adults, and elders as well as intergenerational families. Our analysis highlights the numerous ways that console games serve as a computational meeting place for a diverse population of gamers.”
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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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Voida, Stephen and Greenberg, Saul (2009): WikiFolders: augmenting the display of folders to better convey the meaning of files. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1679-1682. Available online
“Hierarchical file systems and file browsers offer powerful capabilities for managing and organizing folders and files. Yet they lack robust tools for annotating and documenting these files-individually or collectively-with descriptive text. In contrast, Web pages and wikis make it easy to create rich and meaningful narratives around digital artifacts, allowing files to be embedded within explanatory text and images. Unfortunately, considerable effort is required to manage files stored on Web servers and to ensure that the published content remains up-to-date. In this note, we describe WikiFolders, a hybrid system for annotating file folders that draws upon the strengths of both the hierarchical file system and wikis.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Fels, Sidney (2009): Exploring video streams using slit-tear visualizations. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 3509-3510. Available online
“Slit-tear visualizations allow users to selectively visualize pixel paths in a video scene. The slit-tear visualization technique is a generalization of the traditional photographic slit-scanning and more recent video slicing techniques: after a user specifies a pixel path of interest, the system generates a timeline that replicates those pixels for each frame in the video. These rich visualizations of the video data help users to discover and explore spatio-temporal patterns of activity in a video. In this video, we illustrate the use of slit-tear visualizations to detect movement and incidence of activity in a video scene, accentuate directional motion and small changes in the video, and discover patterns of activity between spatially distinct areas of the scene.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Nunes, Michael (2009): Sharing digital photographs in the home by tagging memorabilia. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 3533-3534. Available online
“Within the home, digital photos lack the physical affordances that make collocated photo-sharing easy and opportunistic. Family members have difficulty accessing the personal accounts of the photo organizer, navigating to these photos, or finding the desired ones within the vast number of photos stored on disk. Viewing photos on a standard PC screen is also awkward due to crowding. To promote in-home photo sharing, we designed Souvenirs, an RFID-based system that lets people quickly link digital photo sets to physical memorabilia. These memorabilia trigger memories and serve as social instruments; a person can enrich their story-telling by moving the physical memorabilia close to their large-format television screen, and the associated photos are immediately displayed. A person can also bring a mobile device near memorabilia: the photos appear on that display. Through pick and drop, a person can also transfer the photo display from the mobile device to the large screen for easier viewing. This video motivates and illustrates how all this works.”
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Lanir, Joel, Greenberg, Saul and Fels, Sidney (2009): Supporting transitions in work: informing large display application design by understanding whiteboard use. In: GROUP09 - International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2009. pp. 149-158. Available online
“In this paper, we explore the practice of using a whiteboard for multiple tasks, and specifically how users employ whiteboards to smoothly transition between related sets of tasks. Our study underscores several basic, but important affordances of whiteboards that support this practice, including visual persistence, flexibility of interaction primitives, and their situated physicality. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of large display applications.”
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Saulnier, Paul, Sharlin, Ehud and Greenberg, Saul (2009): Using bio-electrical signals to influence the social behaviours of domesticated robots. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction 2009. pp. 263-264. Available online
“Several emerging computer devices read bio-electrical signals (e.g., electro-corticographic signals, skin biopotential or facial muscle tension) and translate them into computer-understandable input. We investigated how one low-cost commercially-available device could be used to control a domestic robot. First, we used the device to issue direct motion commands; while we could control the device somewhat, it proved difficult to do reliably. Second, we interpreted one class of signals as suggestive of emotional stress, and used that as an emotional parameter to influence (but not directly control) robot behaviour. In this case, the robot would react to human stress by staying out of the person's way. Our work suggests that affecting behaviour may be a reasonable way to leverage such devices.”
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Marquardt, Nicolai, Young, James, Sharlin, Ehud and Greenberg, Saul (2009): Situated messages for asynchronous human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction 2009. pp. 301-302. Available online
“An ongoing issue in human robot interaction (HRI) is how people and robots communicate with one another. While there is considerable work in real-time human-robot communication, fairly little has been done in asynchronous realm. Our approach, which we call situated messages, lets humans and robots asynchronously exchange information by placing physical tokens -- each representing a simple message -- in meaningful physical locations of their shared environment. Using knowledge of the robot's routines, a person can place a message token at a location, where the location is typically relevant to redirecting the robot's behavior at that location. When the robot passes nearby that location, it detects the message and reacts accordingly. Similarly, robots can themselves place tokens at specific locations for people to read. Thus situated messages leverages embodied interaction, where token placement exploits the everyday practices and routines of both people and robots. We describe our working prototype, introduce application scenarios, explore message categories and usage patterns, and suggest future directions.”
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Lapides, Paul, Sharlin, Ehud and Greenberg, Saul (2009): HomeWindow: an augmented reality domestic monitor. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction 2009. pp. 323-324. Available online
“Computation is increasingly prevalent in the home: it serves as a way to control the home itself, or it is part of the many digital appliances within it. The question is: how can home inhabitants effectively understand and control the digital home? Our solution lets a person examine and control their home surroundings through a mobile display that serves as a 'magic lens', where the detail shown varies with proximity. In particular, HomeWindow is an augmented reality system that superimposes an interactive graphical interface atop of physical but digital artifacts in the home. One can get an overview of a room's computational state by looking through the display: the basic state of all digital hot spots are shown atop their physical counterparts. As one approaches a particular digital spot, more detailed information as well as a control interface is shown using a semantic zoom. Our current implementation works with two home devices. First, people can examine and remotely control the status of mobile domestic robots. Second, people can discover the power consumption of household appliances, where appliances are surrounded by a colorful aura that reflects its current and historical energy use.”
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Marquardt, Nicolai, Nacenta, Miguel A., Young, James E., Carpendale, Sheelagh, Greenberg, Saul and Sharlin, Ehud (2009): The Haptic Tabletop Puck: Tactile Feedback for Interactive Tabletops. In: Proceedings of Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, Tabletop 2009, Banff, Canada. . Available online
» 2008 «
Birnholtz, Jeremy, Mak, Clarissa, Greenberg, Saul and Baecker, Ronald M. (2008): Attention by proxy? issues in audience awareness for webcasts to distributed groups. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 103-106. Available online
“Instructor/student interaction in e-learning environments can positively impact both student learning and instructor satisfaction. In online webcast lectures, however, interaction can be difficult because instructors lack basic awareness information about their remote students. Our goal is to better understand the kinds of awareness information that instructors should have if they are to interact frequently and effectively with their students in e-learning environments. We conducted an exploratory study -- via interviews and observations -- of instructor attention in face-to-face classrooms at a large university. Our results imply that a webcast system should provide instructors with overview and detailed data about their students, but that this detailed information should not be displayed publicly.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Buxton, Bill (2008): Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 111-120. Available online
“Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design's scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology -- if any -- must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.”
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Voida, Amy, Voida, Stephen, Greenberg, Saul and He, Helen Ai (2008): Asymmetry in media spaces. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 313-322. Available online
“In any collaborative system, there are both symmetries and asymmetries present in the design of the technology and in the ways that technology is appropriated. Yet media space research tends to focus more on supporting and fostering the symmetries than the asymmetries. Throughout more than 20 years of media space research, the pursuit of increased symmetry, whether achieved through technical or social means, has been a recurrent theme. The research literature on the use of contemporary awareness systems, in contrast, displays little if any of this emphasis on symmetrical use; indeed, this body of research occasionally highlights the perceived value of asymmetry. In this paper, we unpack the different forms of asymmetry present in both media spaces and contemporary awareness systems. We argue that just as asymmetry has been demonstrated to have value in contemporary awareness systems, so might asymmetry have value in media spaces and in other CSCW systems, more generally. To illustrate, we present a media space that emphasizes and embodies multiple forms of asymmetry and does so in response to the needs of a particular work context.”
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Tse, Edward, Greenberg, Saul, Shen, Chia, Forlines, Clifton and Kodama, Ryo (2008): Exploring true multi-user multimodal interaction over a digital table. In: Proceedings of DIS08 Designing Interactive Systems 2008. pp. 109-118. Available online
“True multi-user, multimodal interaction over a digital table lets co-located people simultaneously gesture and speak commands to control an application. We explore this design space through a case study, where we implemented an application that supports the KJ creativity method as used by industrial designers. Four key design issues emerged that have a significant impact on how people would use such a multi-user multimodal system. First, parallel work is affected by the design of multimodal commands. Second, individual mode switches can be confusing to collaborators, especially if speech commands are used. Third, establishing personal and group territories can hinder particular tasks that require artefact neutrality. Finally, timing needs to be considered when designing joint multimodal commands. We also describe our model view controller architecture for true multi-user multimodal interaction.”
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Nunes, Michael, Greenberg, Saul and Neustaedter, Carman (2008): Sharing digital photographs in the home through physical mementos, souvenirs, and keepsakes. In: Proceedings of DIS08 Designing Interactive Systems 2008. pp. 250-260. Available online
“People now easily share digital photos outside the home via web publishing and gift-giving. Yet within the home, digital photos are hard to access and lack the physical affordances that make sharing easy and opportunistic. To promote in-home photo sharing, we designed Souvenirs, a system that lets people link digital photo sets to physical memorabilia. These mementos trigger memories and serve as social instruments; a person can enrich their story-telling by moving the physical memento close to their large-format television screen, and the associated photos are immediately displayed. We implemented Souvenirs, and then re-examined our design premises through contextual interviews with 20 households. Families described their current practices of photo sharing and memento use, and also reacted to the Souvenirs design. Based on these interviews, we redesigned Souvenirs to better fit the real practices of photo and memento use in the home.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Fels, Sidney (2008): Exploring video streams using slit-tear visualizations. In: Levialdi, Stefano (ed.) AVI 2008 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces May 28-30, 2008, Napoli, Italy. pp. 191-198. Available online
» 2007 «
Tse, Edward, Shen, Chia, Greenberg, Saul and Forlines, Clifton (2007): How pairs interact over a multimodal digital table. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 215-218. Available online
“Co-located collaborators often work over physical tabletops using combinations of expressive hand gestures and verbal utterances. This paper provides the first observations of how pairs of people communicated and interacted in a multimodal digital table environment built atop existing single user applications. We contribute to the understanding of these environments in two ways. First, we saw that speech and gesture commands served double duty as both commands to the computer, and as implicit communication to others. Second, in spite of limitations imposed by the underlying single-user application, people were able to work together simultaneously, and they performed interleaving acts: the graceful mixing of inter-person speech and gesture actions as commands to the system. This work contributes to the intricate understanding of multi-user multimodal digital table interaction.”
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Marquardt, Nicolai and Greenberg, Saul (2007): Distributed physical interfaces with shared phidgets. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007. pp. 13-20. Available online
“Tangible interfaces are best viewed as an interacting collection of remotely-located distributed hardware and software components. The problem is that current physical user interface toolkits do not normally offer distributed systems capabilities, leaving developers with extra burdens such as device discovery and management, low-level hardware access, and networking. Our solution is Shared Phidgets, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping distributed physical interfaces. It offers programmers 3 ways to access and control remotely-located hardware, and the ability to create abstract devices by transforming, aggregating and even simulating device capabilities. Network communication and low-level access to device hardware are handled transparently, regardless of device location.”
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Elliot, Kathryn, Neustaedter, Carman and Greenberg, Saul (2007): StickySpots: using location to embed technology in the social practices of the home. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007. pp. 79-86. Available online
“Ethnographic studies of domestic environments have shown the fundamental roles that locations and context play in helping people understand and manage information in their homes. Yet it is not clear how this knowledge can be applied to the design of home technologies. For this reason, we present a case study in home technology design that uses the understandings gained from previous ethnographic studies on domestic locations to motivate the design of a home messaging system. Our prototype, called StickySpots, uses locations to embed technology in the social practices of the home. We then use this case study to reflect more generally on location-based design in the home.”
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Elliot, Kathryn, Watson, Mark, Neustaedter, Carman and Greenberg, Saul (2007): Location-dependent information appliances for the home. In: Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Graphics Interface 2007. pp. 151-158. Available online
“Ethnographic studies of the home revealed the fundamental roles that physical locations and context play in how household members understand and manage conventional information. Yet we also know that digital information is becoming increasingly important to households. The problem is that this digital information is almost always tied to traditional computer displays, which inhibits its incorporation into household routines. Our solution, location-dependent information appliances, exploit both home location and context (as articulated in ethnographic studies) to enhance the role of ambient displays in the home setting; these displays provide home occupants with both background awareness of an information source and foreground methods to gain further details if desired. The novel aspect is that home occupants assign particular information to locations within a home in a way that makes sense to them. As a device is moved to a particular home location, information is automatically mapped to that device along with hints on how it should be displayed.”
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Neustaedter, Carman, Brush, A. J. Bernheim and Greenberg, Saul (2007): A digital family calendar in the home: lessons from field trials of LINC. In: Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Graphics Interface 2007. pp. 199-206. Available online
“Digital family calendars have the potential to help families coordinate, yet they must be designed to easily fit within existing routines or they will simply not be used. To understand the critical factors affecting digital family calendar design, we extended LINC, an inkable family calendar to include ubiquitous access, and then conducted a month-long field study with four families. Adoption and use of LINC during the study demonstrated that LINC successfully supported the families' existing calendaring routines without disrupting existing successful social practices. Families also valued the additional features enabled by LINC. For example, several primary schedulers felt that ubiquitous access positively increased involvement by additional family members in the calendaring routine. The field trials also revealed some unexpected findings, including the importance of mobility -- both within and outside the home -- for the Tablet PC running LINC.”
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Romero, Natalia, McEwan, Gregor and Greenberg, Saul (2007): A field study of community bar: (mis)-matches between theory and practice. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 89-98. Available online
“Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CB's design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted a field study of a group's on-going CB use. We use its results to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical and actual usage behaviors anticipated by our design principles vs. those observed in our deployment. As a critique, this reflection is an important iterative step in recognizing flaws not just as usability problems, but as an incorrect translation of theory into design that can be re-analyzed from a theoretical perspective.”
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Tse, Edward, Shen, Chia, Barnwell, John, Shipman, Sam, Leigh, Darren and Greenberg, Saul (2007): Multimodal Split View Tabletop Interaction Over Existing Applications. In: Second IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems Tabletop 2007 October 10-12, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. pp. 129-136. Available online
Xin, Min, Sharlin, Ehud, Sousa, Mario Costa, Greenberg, Saul and Samavati, Faramarz (2007): Purple crayon: from sketches to interactive environment. In: Inakage, Masa, Lee, Newton, Tscheligi, Manfred, Bernhaupt, Regina and Natkin, Stéphane (eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE 2007 June 13-15, 2007, Salzburg, Austria. pp. 208-211. Available online
Tse, Edward, Hancock, Mark S. and Greenberg, Saul (2007): Speech-filtered bubble ray: improving target acquisition on display walls. In: Massaro, Dominic W., Takeda, Kazuya, Roy, Deb and Potamianos, Alexandros (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces - ICMI 2007 November 12-15, 2007, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan. pp. 307-314. Available online
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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Tse, Edward, Greenberg, Saul, Shen, Chia and Forlines, Clifton (2007): Multimodal multiplayer tabletop gaming. In Computers in Entertainment, 5 (2)
» 2006 «
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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Greenberg, Saul and Boyle, Michael (2006): Generating custom notification histories by tracking visual differences between web page visits. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Graphics Interface 2006. pp. 227-234. Available online
“We contribute a method that lets people create a visual history of custom notifications to track personally meaningful changes to web pages. Notifications are assembled as a collage of regions extracted from the fully rendered (bitmap) representation of the web pages. They are triggered when visual changes between successive visits are detected within regions. To use the system, a person specifies a notification by clipping personally interesting regions from the bitmap representation of a web page and reformatting them into a small collage. The person then specifies regions on the page that will be monitored and compared for visual differences over time. Based on this specification, the system periodically revisits the page in the background on behalf of the user and automatically generations a notification (the collage plus a title and timestamp) when differences are detected. Finally, the person views the generated notifications in several ways: as only the most recently changed version (to illustrate current state), or as an image history that can be individually browsed or played back as a continuous video stream.”
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Tam, James and Greenberg, Saul (2006): A framework for asynchronous change awareness in collaborative documents and workspaces. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64 (7) pp. 583-598
“Change awareness is the ability of individuals to track the asynchronous changes made to a collaborative document or graphical workspace by other participants over time. We develop a framework that articulates what change awareness information is critical if people are to track and maintain change awareness. Information elements include: knowing who changed the artifact, what those changes involve, where changes occur, when changes were made, how things have changed and why people made the changes. The framework accounts for people's need to view these changes from different perspectives: an artifact-based view, a person-based view and a workspace-based view. Each information element is further broken down into distinguishing features and matched against these perspectives, e.g., location history within the where category prompts the questions 'where was this artifact when I left' in the artifact-based view, 'where in the workspace has a person visited' in the person-based view and 'where have people been in the workspace' in the workspace-based view. The framework can be used both to inform and critique change awareness tools.”
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Tse, Edward, Greenberg, Saul and Shen, Chia (2006): SI Demo: Multiuser Gesture / Speech Interaction over Digital Tables by Wrapping Single User Applications. In: Quek, Francis and Yang, Jie (eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces November 2-4, 2006, Banff, Canada. pp. 76-83. Available online
“Tse, E., Greenberg, S., Shen C. (2006) GSI Demo: Multiuser Gesture / Speech Interaction over Digital Tables by Wrapping Single User Applications. Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, November 2, 2006, Banff, Canada”
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Tse, Edward, Greenberg, Saul, Shen, Chia and Forlines, Clifton (2006): Multimodal Multiplayer Tabletop Gaming. In: Proceedings Third International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications (PerGames06), in conjunction with 4th Intl. Conference on Pervasive Computing 2006. pp. 139-148. Available online
“There is a large disparity between the rich physical interfaces of co-located arcade games and the generic input devices seen in most home console systems. In this paper we argue that a digital table is a conducive form factor for general co-located home gaming as it affords: (a) seating in collaboratively relevant positions that give all equal opportunity to reach into the surface and share a common view, (b) rich whole handed gesture input normally only seen when handling physical objects, (c) the ability to monitor how others use space and access objects on the surface, and (d) the ability to communicate to each other and interact atop the surface via gestures and verbal utterances. Our thesis is that multimodal gesture and speech input benefits collaborative interaction over such a digital table. To investigate this thesis, we designed a multimodal, multiplayer gaming environment that allows players to interact directly atop a digital table via speech and rich whole hand gestures. We transform two commercial single player computer games, representing a strategy and simulation game genre, to work within this setting.”
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Tse, Edward, Shen, Chia, Greenberg, Saul and Forlines, Clifton (2006): Enabling Interaction with Single User Applications through Speech and Gestures on a Multi-User Tabletop. In: Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI06) May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 336-343. Available online
“Tse, E., Shen, C., Greenberg, S. and Forlines, C. (2006) Enabling Interaction with Single User Applications through Speech and Gestures on a Multi-User Tabletop. Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'06), May 23-26, Venezia, Italy, ACM Press, 336 - 343.”
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Neustaedter, Carman, Greenberg, Saul and Boyle, Michael (2006): Blur filtration fails to preserve privacy for home-based video conferencing. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13 (1) pp. 1-36
“Always-on video provides rich awareness for distance-separated coworkers. Yet video can threaten privacy, especially when it captures telecommuters working at home. We evaluated video blurring, an image masking method long touted to balance privacy and awareness. Results show that video blurring is unable to balance privacy with awareness for risky situations. Reactions by participants suggest that other popular image masking techniques will be problematic as well. The design implication is that image masking techniques will not suffice for privacy protection in video-based telecommuting situations. Other context-aware privacy-protecting strategies are required, as illustrated in our prototype context-aware home media space.”
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Neustaedter, Carman, Elliot, Kathryn and Greenberg, Saul (2006): Interpersonal awareness in the domestic realm. In: Kjeldskov, Jesper and Paay, Jane (eds.) Proceedings of OZCHI06, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2006. pp. 15-22. Available online
“Family and friends naturally maintain an awareness of each other on an ongoing basis (e.g., knowing one's schedule, health issues) and many technologies are now being contemplated to help fulfill these needs. We use findings from a contextual study along with related work to present interpersonal awareness -- a spectrum that differentiates how people desire and gather awareness for individuals across three different social groupings: home inhabitants, intimate socials, and extended socials. We compare this spectrum to workplace awareness and discuss how our study findings can be used to analyze and design domestic awareness technologies.”
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Smale, Stephanie and Greenberg, Saul (2006): Transient life: collecting and sharing personal information. In: Kjeldskov, Jesper and Paay, Jane (eds.) Proceedings of OZCHI06, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2006. pp. 31-38. Available online
“Millions of people post personal information on the internet, yet the actual information varies greatly. Some pieces are extremely brief, others are highly detailed. Some focus on the moment to moment changes of one's state and thoughts, others describe stable and long-lasting traits. To handle this diversity, we created Transient Life: a system that lets a person gather personal 'transient' information tidbits on the fly and share this collected information with others. Transient Life is designed as a modular sidebar located on the display's periphery. A person uses its modules to: update momentary personal state (feelings, location, happenings, and thoughts), record activity milestones done over the day as well as a 'to do' list of things left to do, collect interesting URLs and photos seen, and compose text essays of whatever has captured their interest. A person can selectively post this information as a 'today message' to one's community, and the essay to one's personal blog. Information is kept in a History Calendar, which allows one to view the information recorded on a past date.”
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Tang, Anthony, Neustaedter, Carman and Greenberg, Saul (2006): VideoArms: Embodiments for Mixed Presence Groupware. In: Proceedings of the HCI06 Conference on People and Computers XX 2006. pp. 85-102.
Tse, Edward, Greenberg, Saul and Shen, Chia (2006): GSI demo: multiuser gesture/speech interaction over digital tables by wrapping single user applications. In: Quek, Francis K. H., Yang, Jie, Massaro, Dominic W., Alwan, Abeer A. and Hazen, Timothy J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces - ICMI 2006 November 2-4, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada. pp. 76-83. Available online
Hancock, Mark S., Miller, John David, Greenberg, Saul and Carpendale, M. Sheelagh T. (2006): Exploring visual feedback of change conflict in a distributed 3D environment. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 209-216. Available online
Tse, Edward, Shen, Chia, Greenberg, Saul and Forlines, Clifton (2006): Enabling interaction with single user applications through speech and gestures on a multi-user tabletop. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 336-343. Available online
» 2005 «
McEwan, Gregor and Greenberg, Saul (2005): Supporting social worlds with the community bar. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 21-30. Available online
“The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar\'s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person\'s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.”
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Smale, Stephanie and Greenberg, Saul (2005): Broadcasting information via display names in instant messaging. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 89-98. Available online
“Many instant messenger (IM) clients let a person specify the identifying name that appears in another person\'s contact list. We have noticed that many people add extra information to this name as a way to broadcast information to their contacts. Twelve IM contact lists comprising 444 individuals were monitored over three weeks to observe how these individuals used and altered their display names. Almost half of them changed their display names at varying frequencies, where the new information fell into seventeen different categories of communication supplied to others. Three themes encompass these categories: Identification (\"who am I\"?), Information About Self (\"this is what is going on with me\") and Broadcast Message (\"I am directing information to the community\"). The design implication is that systems supporting person to person casual interaction, such as IM, should explicitly include facilities that allow people to broadcast these types of information to their community of contacts.”
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Elliot, Kathryn, Neustaedter, Carman and Greenberg, Saul (2005): Time, Ownership and Awareness: The Value of Contextual Locations in the Home. In: Beigl, Michael, Intille, Stephen S., Rekimoto, Jun and Tokuda, Hideyuki (eds.) UbiComp 2005 Ubiquitous Computing - 7th International Conference September 11-14, 2005, Tokyo, Japan. pp. 251-268. Available online
» 2004 «
Greenberg, Saul (2004): Physical user interfaces: what they are and how to build them. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2004. p. 161. Available online
“Physical user interfaces are special purpose devices that can be situated in a real-world setting. Unlike general purpose computers, they are typically designed for particular contexts and uses. In this survey, I present an introductory tour of this new interface genre. First, I will summarize what they are by describing several design niches for these devices: ubiquitous computing, tangible media, foreground and ambient devices, collaborative devices, roomware, and physical controls. Examples will be plentiful, and will range from the playful, to the artistic, and to the serious. Second, I will introduce technologies that are suitable for software professionals who wish to prototype these physical user interfaces. The commercially available Phidgets (www.phidgets.com) are used as a case study of what is available and what can be done with them.”
Copyrights may apply
Kruger, Russell, Carpendale, Sheelagh, Scott, Stacey D. and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Roles of Orientation in Tabletop Collaboration: Comprehension, Coordination and Communication. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (5) pp. 501-537
“In order to support co-located collaboration, many researchers are now investigating how to effectively augment tabletops with electronic displays. As far back as 1988, orientation was recognized as a significant human factors issue that must be addressed by electronic tabletop designers. As with traditional tables, when people stand or sit at different positions around a horizontal display they will be viewing the contents from different angles. One common solution to this problem is to have the software reorient objects so that a given individual can view them right way up. Yet is this the best approach? If not, how do people actually use orientation on tables? To answer these questions, we conducted an observational study of collaborative activity on a traditional table. Our results show that the strategy of reorienting objects to a persons view is overly simplistic: while important, it is an incomplete view of how people exploit their ability to reorient objects. Orientation proves critical in how individuals comprehend information, how collaborators coordinate their actions, and how they mediate communication. The coordinating role of orientation is evident in how people establish personal and group spaces and how they signal ownership of objects. In terms of communication, orientation is useful in initiating communicative exchanges and in continuing to speak to individuals about particular objects and work patterns as collaboration progresses. The three roles of orientation have significant implications for the design of tabletop software and the assessment of existing tabletop systems.”
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
Tse, Edward and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Rapidly Prototyping Single Display Groupware through the SDGToolkit. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Australasian User Interface Conference, Volume 28 in the CRPIT Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology Series January, 2004, Dunedin, NZ. pp. 101-110. Available online
“Researchers in Single Display Groupware (SDG) explore how multiple users share a single display such as a computer monitor, a large wall display, or an electronic tabletop display. Yet today's personal computers are designed with the assumption that one person interacts with the display at a time. Thus researchers and programmers face considerable hurdles if they wish to develop SDG. Our solution is the SDGToolkit, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping SDG. SDGToolkit automatically captures and manages multiple mice and keyboards, and presents them to the programmer as uniquely identified input events relative to either the whole screen or a particular window. It transparently provides multiple cursors, one for each mouse. To handle orientation issues for tabletop displays (i.e., people seated across from one another), programmers can specify a participant's seating angle, which automatically rotates the cursor and translates input coordinates so the mouse behaves correctly. Finally, SDGToolkit provides an SDG-aware widget class layer that significantly eases how programmers create novel graphical components that recognize and respond to multiple inputs.”
Copyrights may apply
Tse, Edward, Histon, Jonathan, Scott, Stacey and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Avoiding Interference: How People Use Spatial Separation and Partitioning in SDG Workspaces. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work November 6-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA. pp. 252-261. Available online
“Single Display Groupware (SDG) lets multiple co-located people, each with their own input device, interact simultaneously over a single communal display. While SDG is beneficial, there is risk of interference: when two people are interacting in close proximity, one person can raise an interface component (such as a menu, dialog box, or movable palette) over another person's working area, thus obscuring and hindering the other's actions. Consequently, researchers have developed special purpose interaction components to mitigate interference techniques. Yet is interference common in practice? If not, then SDG versions of conventional interface components could prove more suitable. We hypothesize that collaborators spatially separate their activities to the extent that they partition their workspace into distinct areas when working on particular tasks, thus reducing the potential for interference. We tested this hypothesis by observing co-located people performing a set of collaborative drawing exercises in an SDG workspace, where we paid particular attention to the locations of their simultaneous interactions. We saw that spatial separation and partitioning occurred consistently and naturally across all participants, rarely requiring any verbal negotiation. Particular divisions of the space varied, influenced by seating position and task semantics. These results suggest that people naturally avoid interfering with one another by spatially separating their actions. This has design implications for SDG interaction techniques, especially in how conventional widgets can be adapted to an SDG setting.
”
Copyrights may apply
Tse, Edward and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Rapidly Prototyping Single Display Groupware through the SDGToolkit. In: Cockburn, Andy (ed.) AUIC2004 - User Interfaces 2004 - Fifth Australasian User Interface Conference 18-22 January, 2004, Dunedin, New Zealand. pp. 101-110. Available online
Greenberg, Saul (2004): Enhancing Creativity with (Groupware) Toolkits. In: Cockburn, Andy (ed.) AUIC2004 - User Interfaces 2004 - Fifth Australasian User Interface Conference 18-22 January, 2004, Dunedin, New Zealand. p. 3. Available online
Boyle, Michael and Greenberg, Saul (2004): Display and Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Groupware. In: Cockburn, Andy (ed.) AUIC2004 - User Interfaces 2004 - Fifth Australasian User Interface Conference 18-22 January, 2004, Dunedin, New Zealand. pp. 73-82. Available online
» 2003 «
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
Kruger, Russell, Carpendale, Sheelagh, Scott, Stacey D. and Greenberg, Saul (2003): How people use orientation on tables: comprehension, coordination and communication. 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. 369-378. Available online
“In order to support co-located collaboration, many researchers are now investigating how to effectively augment tabletops with electronic displays. As far back as 1988, orientation was recognized as a significant human factor issue that must be addressed by electronic tabletop designers. As with traditional tables, when people stand at different positions around a horizontal display they will be viewing the contents from different angles. One common solution to this problem is to have the software reorient objects so that any given individual can view them 'right way up.' Yet is this the best approach? If not, how do people actually use orientation on tables? To answer these questions, we conducted an observational study of collaborative activity on a traditional table. Our results show that the strategy of reorienting objects to a person's view is overly simplistic: while important, it is an incomplete view of how people exploit their ability to reorient objects. Orientation proves critical in how individuals comprehend information, how collaborators coordinate their actions, and how they mediate communication. The coordinating role of orientation is evident in how people establish personal and group spaces, and how they signal ownership of objects. In terms of communication, orientation is useful in initiating communicative exchanges and in continuing to speak to individuals about particular objects and work patterns as collaboration progresses. The three roles of orientation have significant implications for the design of tabletop software and the assessment of existing tabletop systems.”
Copyrights may apply
Tang, Charlotte, McEwan, Gregor and Greenberg, Saul (2003): A Taxonomy of Tasks and Visualizations for Casual Interaction of Multimedia Histories. In: Graphics Interface 2003 June 11-13, 2003, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. pp. 225-236.
Diaz-Marino, Rob, Tse, Edward and Greenberg, Saul (2003): Programming for Multiple Touches and Multiple Users: A Toolkit for the DiamondTouch™ Hardware. In: Companion Proceedings of ACM UIST03 Conference on User Interface Software and Technology 2003, Vancouver, BC, Canada. . Available online
“Diaz-Marino, R.A., Tse, E, and Greenberg, S. (2003) Programming for Multiple Touches and Multiple Users: A Toolkit for the DiamondTouch™ Hardware. Companion Proceedings of ACM UIST'03 Conference on User Interface Software and Technology.”
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Neustaedter, Carman and Greenberg, Saul (2003): The Design of a Context-Aware Home Media Space for Balancing Privacy and Awareness. In: Dey, Anind K., Schmidt, Albrecht and McCarthy, Joseph F. (eds.) UbiComp 2003 Ubiquitous Computing - 5th International Conference October 12-15, 2003, Seattle, WA, USA. pp. 297-314. Available online
Wong, Nelson, Carpendale, M. Sheelagh T. and Greenberg, Saul (2003): EdgeLens: An Interactive Method for Managing Edge Congestion in Graphs. In: InfoVis 2003 - 9th IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 20-21 October, 2003, Seattle, WA, USA. . Available online
» 2002 «
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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Greenberg, Saul and Boyle, Michael (2002): Customizable physical interfaces for interacting with conventional applications. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel (ed.) Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology October 27-30, 2002, Paris, France. pp. 31-40. Available online
“When using today's productivity applications, people rely heavily on
graphical controls (GUI widgets) as the way to invoke application functions and
to obtain feedback. Yet we all know that certain controls can be difficult or
tedious to find and use. As an alternative, a customizable physical interface
lets an end-user easily bind a modest number of physical controls to similar
graphical counterparts. The user can then use the physical control to invoke
the corresponding graphical control's function, or to display its graphical
state in a physical form. To show how customizable physical interfaces work, we
present examples that illustrate how our combined phidgets and widget tap
packages are used to link existing application widgets to physical controls.
While promising, our implementation prompts a number of issues relevant to
others pursuing interface customization.”
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
Kaasten, S., Greenberg, Saul and Edwards, C. (2002): How People Recognise Previously Seen Web Pages from Titles, URLs and Thumbnails. In: Proceedings of the HCI02 Conference on People and Computers XVI 2002. pp. 247-266.
» 2001 «
Greenberg, Saul and Rounding, Michael (2001): The Notification Collage: Posting Information to Public and Personal Displays. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel and Jacob, Robert J. K. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2001 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 31 - April 5, 2001, Seattle, Washington, USA. pp. 514-521. Available online
“The Notification Collage (NC) is a groupware system where distributed and co-located colleagues comprising a small community post media elements onto a real-time collaborative surface that all members can see. Akin to collages of information found on public bulletin boards, NC randomly places incoming elements onto this surface. People can post assorted media: live video from desktop cameras; editable sticky notes; activity indicator; slide shows displaying a series of digital photos, snapshots of a person's digital desktop, and Web page thumbnails. User experiences show that NC becomes a rich resource for awareness and collaboration. Community members indicate their presence to others by posting live video. They regularly act on this information by engaging in text and video conversations. Because all people can overhear conversations, these become active opportunities to join in. People also post items they believe will be interesting to others, such as desktop snapshots and vacation photos. Finally, people use NC somewhat differently when it is displayed on a large public screen than when it appears on a personal computer.”
Copyrights may apply
Greenberg, Saul (2001): Context as a Dynamic Construct. In Human-Computer Interaction, 16 (2) pp. 257-268
“Context is a dynamic construct. Although some contextual situations are fairly stable, discernable, and predictable, there are many others that are not. Similar looking contextual situations may actually differ dramatically, due perhaps to people's previous episodes of use, the state of their social interactions, their changing internal goals, and the nuances of local influences. The consequence is that, for all but simple cases, the designer of a context-aware application may find it difficult or even impossible to (a) enumerate the set of contextual states that may exist, (b) know what information could accurately determine a contextual state within that set, and (c) state what appropriate action should be taken from a particular state.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Fitchett, Chester (2001): Phidgets: easy development of physical interfaces through physical widgets. In: Marks, Joe and Mynatt, Elizabeth D. (eds.) Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 11 - 14, 2001, Orlando, Florida. pp. 209-218. Available online
“Physical widgets or phidgets are to physical user interfaces what widgets
are to graphical user interfaces. Similar to widgets, phidgets abstract and
package input and output devices: they hide implementation and construction
details, they expose functionality through a well-defined API, and they have an
(optional) on-screen interactive interface for displaying and controlling
device state. Unlike widgets, phidgets also require: a connection manager to
track how devices appear on-line; a way to link a software phidget with its
physical counterpart; and a simulation mode to allow the programmer to develop,
debug and test a physical interface even when no physical device is present.
Our evaluation shows that everyday programmers using phidgets can rapidly
develop physical interfaces.”
Copyrights may apply
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
Zanella, A. and Greenberg, Saul (2001): Reducing interference in single display groupware through transparency. In: Ecscw 2001 - Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 16-20 September, 2001, Bonn, Germany. pp. 339-358.
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
Greenberg, Saul (2001): Supporting Casual Interaction Between Intimate Collaborators. 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. 3-4. Available online
» 2000 «
Boyle, Michael, Edwards, Christopher and Greenberg, Saul (2000): The Effects of Filtered Video on Awareness and Privacy. In: Kellogg, Wendy A. and Whittaker, Steve (eds.) Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 1-10. Available online
“Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive information. While a variety of filtering techniques exist, they have not been evaluated for how well they safeguard privacy. In this paper, we analyze how a blur and a pixelize video filter might impact both awareness and privacy in a media space. Each filter is considered at nine different levels of fidelity, ranging from heavily applied filter levels that mask almost all information, to lightly applied filters that reveal almost everything. We examined how well observers of several filtered video scenes extract particular awareness cues: the number of actors; their posture (moving, standing, seated); their gender; the visible objects (basic to detailed); and how available people look (their busyness, seriousness and approachability). We also examined the privacy-preserving potential of each filter level in the context of common workplace activities. Our results suggest that the blur filter, and to a lesser extent the pixelize filter, have a level suitable for providing awareness information while safeguarding privacy.”
Copyrights may apply
Cox, Donald and Greenberg, Saul (2000): Supporting Collaborative Interpretation in Distributed Groupware. In: Kellogg, Wendy A. and Whittaker, Steve (eds.) Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 289-298. Available online
“Collaborative interpretation occurs when a group interprets and transforms a diverse set of information fragments into a coherent set of meaningful descriptions. This activity is characterized by emergence, where the participants' shared understanding develops gradually as they interact with each other and the source material. Our goal is to support collaborative interpretation by small, distributed groups. To achieve this, we first observed how face-to-face groups perform collaborative interpretation in a particular work context. We then synthesized design principles from two relevant areas: the key behaviors of people engaged in activities where emergence occurs, and how distributed groups work together over visual surfaces. We built and evaluated a system that supports a specific collaborative interpretation task. This system provides a large workspace and several objects that encourages emergence in interpretation. People manipulate cards that contain the raw information fragments. They reduce complexity by placing duplicate cards into piles. They suggest groupings as they manipulate the spatial layout of cards and piles. They enrich spatial layouts through notes, text and freehand annotations. They record their understanding of their final groupings as reports containing coherent descriptions.”
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.”
Copyrights may apply
Greenberg, Saul (1999): Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 3 (4)
Greenberg, Saul, Boyle, Michael and Laberge, Jason (1999): PDAs and Shared Public Displays: Making Personal Information Public, and Public Information Personal. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 3 (1)
Johnson, Brad and Greenberg, Saul (1999): Judging People's Availability for Interaction from Video Snapshots. In: HICSS 1999 1999. . 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.”
Copyrights may apply
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
Cockburn, Andy and Greenberg, Saul (1998): The Design and Evolution of Turboturtle, a Collaborative Microworld for Exploring Newtonian Physics. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 48 (6) pp. 777-801
“TurboTurtle is a dynamic multi-user microworld for the exploration of Newtonian physics. With TurboTurtle, students can alter the attributes of the simulation environment, such as gravity, friction, and presence or absence of walls. Students explore the microworld by manipulating a variety of parameters, and learn concepts by studying the behaviours and interactions that occur. TurboTurtle has evolved into a "group-aware" system where several students, each on their own computer, can simultaneously control the microworld and gesture around the shared display. TurboTurtle's design rationale includes concepts such as equal opportunity controls, simulation timing, concrete vs. abstract controls, recoverability, and how strictly views should be shared between students. Teachers can also add structure to the group's activities by setting the simulation environment to an interesting state, which includes a set of problems and questions. Observations of pairs of young children using TurboTurtle highlight extremes in collaboration styles, from conflict to smooth interaction. Finally, the technical work in making TurboTurtle group-aware is slight, primarily because it was built with a groupware toolkit called GroupKit.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1997 «
Tauscher, Linda and Greenberg, Saul (1997): Revisitation Patterns in World Wide Web Navigation. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 399-406. Available online
“We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web pages, and use these to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed 6 weeks of usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial web browser. We found that 58% of an individual's pages are revisits, and that users continually add new web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history mechanisms, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. Our results suggest new approaches to managing history in browsers.”
Copyrights may apply
Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1997): Simplifying Component Development in an Integrated Groupware Environment. In: Robertson, George G. and Schmandt, Chris (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology October 14 - 17, 1997, Banff, Alberta, Canada. pp. 65-72. Available online
“This paper describes our experiences implementing a component architecture for TeamWave Workplace, an integrated groupware environment using a rooms metaphor. The problem we faced was how to design the architecture to support rapid development of new embedded components. Our solution, based on Tcl/Tk and GroupKit, uses multiple interpreters and a shared window hierarchy. This proved effective in easing development complexity in TeamWave. We discuss some of the strategies we used, and identify the types of interactions between system components. The lessons learned in developing this component model should be generally applicable to future integrated groupware systems in different environments.”
Copyrights may apply
Tauscher, Linda and Greenberg, Saul (1997): How People Revisit Web Pages: Empirical Findings and Implications for the Design of History Systems. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47 (1) pp. 97-137
“We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (web) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analysed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a well-known web browser. We found that 58% of an individual's pages are revisits, and that users continually add new web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history mechanisms, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. Based on empirical evidence, eight design guidelines for web browser history mechanisms were then formulated. When used to evaluate the existing hypertext-based history mechanisms, they explain why some aspects of today's browsers seem to work well, and other's poorly. The guidelines also indicate how history mechanisms in the web can be made even more effective.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1996 «
Greenberg, Saul (1996): Teaching Human Computer Interaction to Programmers. In Interactions, 3 (4) pp. 62-76
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.”
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Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1996): TeamRooms: Network Places for Collaboration. 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. 325-333. Available online
“Teams whose members are in close physical proximity often rely on team rooms to serve both as meeting places and repositories of the documents and artifacts that support their projects. TeamRooms is a groupware system that fills the role of a team room for groups whose members can work both co-located and at a distance. Facilities in TeamRooms allow team members to collaborate either in real-time or asynchronously, and to customize their shared electronic space with tools to suit their needs. Unlike many groupware systems, all TeamRooms documents and artifacts are fully persistent.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1996): Building Real-Time Groupware with GroupKit, a Groupware Toolkit. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3 (1) pp. 66-106
“This article presents an overview of GroupKit, a groupware toolkit that lets developers build applications for synchronous and distributed computer-based conferencing. GroupKit was constructed from our belief that programming groupware should be only slightly harder than building functionally similar single-user systems. We have been able to significantly reduce the implementation complexity of groupware through the key features that comprise GroupKit. A runtime infrastructure automatically manages the creation, interconnection, and communications of the distributed processes that comprise conference sessions. A set of groupware programming abstractions allows developers to control the behavior of distributed processes, to take action on state changes, and to share relevant data. Groupware widgets let interface features of value to conference participants to be easily added to groupware applications. Session managers -- interfaces that let people create and manage their meetings -- are decoupled from groupware applications and are built by developers to accommodate the group's working style. Example GroupKit applications in a variety of domains have been implemented with only modest effort.”
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Schaffer, Doug, Zuo, Zhengping, Greenberg, Saul, Bartram, Lyn, Dill, John C., Dubs, Shelli and Roseman, Mark (1996): Navigating Hierarchically Clustered Networks through Fisheye and Full-Zoom Methods. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3 (2) pp. 162-188
“Many information structures are represented as two-dimensional networks (connected graphs) of links and nodes. Because these network tend to be large and quite complex, people often prefer to view part or all of the network at varying levels of detail. Hierarchical clustering provides a framework for viewing the network at different levels of detail by superimposing a hierarchy on it. Nodes are grouped into clusters, and clusters are themselves place into other clusters. Users can then navigate these clusters until an appropriate level of detail is reached. This article describes an experiment comparing two methods for viewing hierarchically clustered networks. Traditional full-zoom techniques provide details of only the current level of the hierarchy. In contrast, fisheye views, generated by the "variable-zoom" algorithm described in this article, provide information about higher levels as well. Subjects using both viewing methods were given problem-solving tasks requiring them to navigate a network, in this case, a simulated telephone system, and to reroute links in it. Results suggest that the greater context provided by fisheye views significantly improved user performance. Users were quicker to complete their task and made fewer unnecessary navigational steps through the hierarchy. This validation of fisheye views in important for designers of interfaces to complicated monitoring systems, such as control rooms for supervisory control and data acquisition systems, where efficient human performance is often critical. However, control room operators remained concerned about the size and visibility tradeoffs between the fine room operators remained concerned about the size and visibility tradeoffs between the fine detail provided by full-zoom techniques and the global context supplied by fisheye views. Specific interface features are required to reconcile the differences.”
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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
Greenberg, Saul (1996): Teaching Human Computer Interaction to Programmers. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 28 (2) pp. 5-6
» 1995 «
Baecker, Ronald M., Grudin, Jonathan, Buxton, William and Greenberg, Saul (eds.) (1995): Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
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» 1994 «
Greenberg, Saul and Marwood, David (1994): Real Time Groupware as a Distributed System: Concurrency Control and its Effect on the Interface. In: Smith, John B., Smith, F. Don and Malone, Thomas W. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work October 22 - 26, 1994, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. pp. 207-217. Available online
“This paper exposes the concurrency control problem in groupware when it is implemented as a distributed system. Traditional concurrency control methods cannot be applied directly to groupware because system interactions include people as well as computers. Methods, such as locking, serialization, and their degree of optimism, are shown to have quite different impacts on the interface and how operations are displayed and perceived by group members. The paper considers both human and technical considerations that designers should ponder before choosing a particular concurrency control method. It also reviews our work-in-progress designing and implementing a library of concurrency schemes in GROUPKIT, a groupware toolkit.”
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» 1993 «
Greenberg, Saul (1993): The Computer User as Toolsmith: The Use, Reuse, and Organization of Computer-Based Tools. Cambridge University Press
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Maulsby, David, Greenberg, Saul and Mander, Richard (1993): Prototyping an Intelligent Agent through Wizard of Oz. In: Ashlund, Stacey, Mullet, Kevin, Henderson, Austin, Hollnagel, Erik and White, Ted (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 93 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 24-29, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 277-284. Available online
“Turvy is a simulated prototype of an instructible agent. The user teaches it by demonstrating actions and pointing at or talking about relevant data. We formalized our assumptions about what could be implemented, then used the Wizard of Oz to flesh out a design and observe users' reactions as they taught several editing tasks. We found: a) all users invent a similar set of commands to teach the agent; b) users learn the agent's language by copying its speech; c) users teach simple tasks with ease and complex ones with reasonable effort; and d) agents cannot expect users to point to or identify critical features without prompting. In conducting this rather complex simulation, we learned some lessons about using the Wizard of Oz to prototype intelligent agents: a) design of the simulation benefits greatly from prior implementation experience; b) the agent's behavior and dialog capabilities must be based on formal models; c) studies of verbal discourse lead directly to an implementable system; d) the designer benefits greatly by becoming the Wizard; and e) qualitative data is more valuable for answering global concerns, while quantitative data validates accounts and answers fine-grained questions.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Witten, Ian H. (1993): Supporting Command Reuse: Empirical Foundations and Principles. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 39 (3) pp. 353-390
“Current user interfaces fail to support some work habits that people naturally adopt when interacting with general-purpose computer environments. In particular, users frequently and persistently repeat their activities (e.g. command line entries, menu selections, navigating paths), but computers do little to help them to review and re-execute earlier ones. At most, systems provide ad hoc history mechanisms founded on the premise that the last few inputs form a reasonable selection of candidates for reuse. This paper provides theoretical and empirical foundations for the design of a reuse facility that helps people to recall, modify and re-submit their previous activities to computers. It abstracts several striking characteristics of repetitious behaviour by studying traces of user activities. It presents a general model of interaction called "recurrent systems". Particular attention is paid to the repetition of command lines given a sequential history list of previous ones, and this distribution can be conditioned in several ways to enhance predictive power. Reformulated as empirically-based general principles, the model provides design guidelines for history systems specifically and modern user interfaces generally.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Witten, Ian H. (1993): Supporting Command Reuse: Mechanisms for Reuse. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 39 (3) pp. 391-425
“Reuse facilities help people to recall and modify their earlier activities and re-submit them to the computer. This paper examines such mechanisms for reuse. First, guidelines for building reuse facilities are summarized. Second, existing reuse facilities are surveyed under four main headings: history mechanisms, adaptive systems, programming by example, and explicit customization. The first kind relies on temporally ordered lists of interactions, the second builds statistical dynamic models of past activities and uses them to expedite future interactions, the third collects and generalizes more extensive sequences of activities for future reuse, while in the fourth the user explicitly collects items of interest. Third, the paper presents WORKBENCH, a reuse facility that uses an empirically-derived history system as a way of capturing and organizing one's situated activities. An appendix reports a study of a widely-available history system, the UNIX csh, and explains why it is poorly used in practice.”
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Cockburn, Andy and Greenberg, Saul (1993): Making Contact: Getting the Group Communicating with Groupware. In: Kaplan, Simon M. (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems 1993 November 1-4, 1993, Milpitas, California, USA. pp. 31-41. Available online
“While groupware is readily available, people on wide area networks -- such as the Internet -- have considerable trouble contacting each other and setting up groupware connections. To pinpoint why this occurs, this paper identifies human factors critical to getting a group communicating through groupware. It addresses how people find suitable partners, and how people choose appropriate communication mediums. These factors are discussed in detail, and form a design foundation for systems that promote social presence and that integrate communication. Existing systems are critically reviewed and shown to be inadequate for general use over a wide area net, for they either do not meet some basic design criteria, or they require a very high technological entry level that is beyond the reach of most computer users. As an alternative, the paper presents the design considerations behind TELEFREEK, a flexible, extensible, and customizable platform for collaboration. Drawing on resources freely available to the Internet community, TELEFREEK assists people making contact with others, and integrates access to common communication facilities.”
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Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1993): Building Flexible Groupware Through Open Protocols. In: Kaplan, Simon M. (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems 1993 November 1-4, 1993, Milpitas, California, USA. pp. 279-288. Available online
“This paper presents a technical approach to building flexible groupware applications. Flexibility provides the promise of personalizable groupware, allowing different groups to work with the system in diverse ways which best suit the group's own needs. An implementation technique called open protocols is described, which is a variation of client/server architectures. Open protocols facilitate the addition of group-specific modules long after the system has been created. Three examples illustrating the use of open protocols are presented: floor control, conference registration, and brainstorming. Finally, a number of issues facing the groupware developer using open protocols are addressed, along with strategies that can help in dealing with these issues.”
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Schaffer, Doug, Zou, Zhengping, Bartram, Lyn, Dill, John C., Dubs, Shelli, Greenberg, Saul and Roseman, Mark (1993): Comparing fisheye and full--zoom techniques for navigation of hierarchically clustered networks. In: Graphics Interface 93 May 19-21, 1993, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 87-96.
» 1992 «
Roseman, Mark and Greenberg, Saul (1992): GROUPKIT: A Groupware Toolkit for Building Real-Time Conferencing Applications. In: Mantel, Marilyn and Baecker, Ronald M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work November 01 - 04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 43-50. Available online
“This paper presents our approach to the design of groupware toolkits for real-time work, and how the design is instantiated in our toolkit, GROUPKIT. The design is based on both the technical underpinnings necessary for real-time groupware, and on user-centered features identified by existing CSCW human factors work. We also present three strategies for building GROUPKIT's components. First, an extendible, object-oriented run-time architecture supports managing distributed processes and the communication between them. Second, transparent overlays offer a convenient method for adding general components to various groupware applications, for example supporting gestures via multiple cursors and annotation via sketching. Third, open protocols allow the groupware designer to create a wide range of interface and interaction policies, accommodating group differences in areas such as conference registration and floor control.”
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Greenberg, Saul, Roseman, Mark, Webster, Dave and Bohnet, Ralph (1992): Human and Technical Factors of Distributed Group Drawing Tools. In Interacting with Computers, 4 (3) pp. 364-392
“Groupware designers are now developing multi-user equivalents of popular paint and draw applications. Their job is not an easy one. First, human factors issues peculiar to group interaction appear that, if ignored, seriously limit the usability of the group tool. Second, implementation is fraught with considerable technical hurdles. This paper describes the human and technical factors that have been met and handled by researchers and implementors of group drawing tools. We emphasize our own experiences building four systems supporting remote real time group interaction: GroupSketch and XGroupSketch, both multi-user sketchpads; GroupDraw, a prototype object-based multi-user drawing package, and GroupKit, a groupware toolkit. On the human factors side, we summarize empirically-derived design principles that we believe are critical to building useful and usable collaborative drawing tools. On the implementation side, we describe our experiences with replicated versus centralized architectures, schemes for participant registration, multiple cursors, network requirements, and the structure of the drawing primitives. A brief survey of other approaches to group drawing is also included.”
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» 1991 «
Greenberg, Saul (1991): Personalisable groupware: Accommodating individual roles and group differences. In: Bannon, Liam, Robinson, Mike and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 91 - Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1991. .
Greenberg, Saul (1991): Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware: An Introduction to the Special Issues. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34 (2) pp. 133-141
Witten, Ian H., Thimbleby, Harold, Coulouris, G. F. and Greenberg, Saul (1991): Liveware: A New Approach to Sharing Data in Social Networks. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34 (3) pp. 337-348
“While most schemes that support information sharing on computers rely on formal protocols, in practice much cooperative work takes place using informal means of communication, even chance encounters. This paper proposes a new method of enabling information sharing in loosely-couple socially-organized systems, typically involving personal rather than institutional computers and lacking the network infrastructure that is generally taken for granted in distributed computing. It is based on the idea of arranging for information transmission to take place as an unobtrusive side-effect of interpersonal communication. Update conflicts are avoided by an information ownership scheme. Under mild assumptions, we show how the distributed database satisfies the property of observational consistency. The new idea, called "Liveware", is not so much a specific piece of technology as a fresh perspective on information sharing that stimulates new ways of solving old problems. Being general, it transcends particular distribution technologies. A prototype database, implemented in HyperCard and taking the form of an electronic directory, utilizes the medium of floppy disk to spread information in a (benign!) virus-like manner.”
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Greenberg, Saul and Bohnet, Ralph (1991): Groupsketch: A multi--user sketchpad for geographically distributed small groups. In: Graphics Interface 91 June 3-7, 1991, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. pp. 207-215.
Greenberg, Saul (1991): An Annotated Bibliography of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23 (3) pp. 29-62
“Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is a new multi-disciplinary field with roots in many disciplines. Due to the area's youth and diversity, few specialized books or journals are available, and articles are scattered amongst diverse journals, proceedings and technical reports. Building a CSCW reference library is particularly demanding, for it is difficult for the new researcher to discover relevant documents. To aid this task, this article compiles, lists and annotates some of the current research in computer supported cooperative work into a bibliography. Over 300 references are included.”
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Greenberg, Saul (ed.) (1991): Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware. London, Academic Press
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» 1990 «
Greenberg, Saul (1990): Sharing Views and Interactions with Single-User Applications. In: Lochovsky, Frederick H. and Allen, Robert (eds.) Proceedings of the Conference on Office Information Systems 1990 April 25-27, 1990, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. pp. 227-237.
“Although work is frequently collaborative, most computer-based activities revolve around software packages designed to be used by one person at a time. To get around this, people working together often talk and gesture around a computer screen, perhaps taking turns interacting with the running "single-user" application by passing the keyboard around. However, it is technically possible to share these unaltered applications -- even though they were originally designed for a single user only -- across physically different workstations through special view-sharing software. Each person sees the same image of the running application on their own screen, and has an opportunity to interact with it by talking turns. This paper discusses the various roles and responsibilities of the view-sharing software that must be considered during its design and evaluation: view management, floor control, conference registration by participants, and handling of meta-level communications. A brief survey of existing shared view systems is provided for background.”
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» 1989 «
Greenberg, Saul (1989): The 1988 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 21 (1) pp. 49-55
» 1988 «
Greenberg, Saul and Witten, Ian H. (1988): How Users Repeat Their Actions on Computers: Principles for Design of History Mechanisms. In: Soloway, Elliot, Frye, Douglas and Sheppard, Sylvia B. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 88 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 15-19, 1988, Washington, DC, USA. pp. 171-178.
“Several striking characteristics of how often people repeat their actions on interactive systems are abstracted from usage data gleaned from many users of different classes over a period of months. Reformulated as empirically-based general principles, these provide design guidelines for history mechanisms specifically and modern user interfaces generally. Particular attention is paid to the repetition of command lines, and to the probability distribution of the next line given a sequential "history list" of previous ones. Several ways are examined of conditioning this distribution to enhance predictive power. A brief case study of actual use of a widely-used history system is also included.”
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» 1985 «
Greenberg, Saul and Witten, Ian H. (1985): Adaptive Personalized Interfaces -- A Question of Viability. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 4 (1) pp. 31-45
“It is widely accepted that interfaces between computers and users should differ to accommodate individual, or group, needs. One method of 'personalizing' an interface is to have the system form a limited model of the user and employ it to fashion the dialogue to his needs. Unfortunately, little is known about the effect of adaptation on the man-machine interface. Although obvious advantages accrue from 'personalized' interfaces, there are also obvious disadvantages to presenting users with a changing, adapting and perhaps apparently inconsistent interface. The goal of this work is to determine the viability of an adaptive interface through a human-factor pilot study of a simple, specially designed, interactive computer system. The system uses menu-driven selection to retrieve entries from a large ordered telephone directory. This simple task has several advantages: it is a realistic application area for interactive computers; plausible adaptive modelling methods exist and have been studied theoretically; and previous work has determined the best way to display the menus to users. The results of this empirical study support the use of adaptive user modelling. In the (admittedly highly constrained) example system, a computer interface can indeed adapt successfully to every user. Although it does not necessarily generalize to other user interfaces, the result supplies evidence to refute published objections to adaptive user modelling in general.”
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» 1984 «
Witten, Ian H., Cleary, John G. and Greenberg, Saul (1984): On Frequency-Based Menu-Splitting Algorithms. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 21 (2) pp. 135-148
“If a menu-driven display is to be device-independent, the storage of information must be separated from its presentation by creating menus dynamically. As a first step, this article evaluates menu-construction algorithms for ordered directories whose access profile is specified. The algorithms are evaluated by the average number of selections required to retrieve items. While it is by no means suggested that the system designer should ignore other relevant information (natural groupings of menu items, context in terms of prior selections, and so on), the average selection count provides an unambiguous quantitative criterion by which to evaluate the performance of menu-construction algorithms. Even in this tightly-circumscribed situation, optimal menu construction is surprisingly difficult. If the directory entries are accessed uniformly, theoretical analysis leads to a selection algorithm different from the obvious one of splitting ranges into approximately equal parts at each stage. Analysis is intractable for other distributions, although the performance of menu-splitting algorithms can be bounded. The optimal menu tree can be found by searching, but this is computationally infeasible for any but the smallest problems. Several practical algorithms, which differ in their treatment of rounding in the menu-splitting process and lead in general to quite different menu trees, have been investigated by computer simulation with a Zipf distribution access profile. Surprisingly, their performance is remarkably similar. However, our limited experience with optimal menu trees suggests that these algorithms leave some room for improvement.”
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» 1983 «
Witten, Ian H., Greenberg, Saul and Cleary, John G. (1983): Personalizable directories: A case study in automatic user modelling. In: Graphics Interface 83 May 9-13, 1983, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. pp. 183-189.
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