Society and organizations are undergoing a profound digital transformation, driven by emerging technological advances and new paradigms that address the growing demands of productive, commercial, service-related, and social activities. This evolution has led to the emergence of so-called Next-Generation Collaborative Environments, where providing awareness remains a critical factor for usability, efficiency and a satisfactory user experience. In this work, we analyse some significant awareness frameworks from the literature and propose a new conceptualisation tailored to these emergent environments, aimed at groupware designers. Our proposal is novel in both its scope and its non-linear approach to the awareness areas and dimensions it encompasses. This conceptual schema has been preliminarily validated through its application to the modelling of a diverse set of case studies.

Voice assistants have shown great potential to support older adults at home and improve their quality of life. Nevertheless, its use in nursing home contexts has not been sufficiently explored. The article presents a study carried out with 21 residents, both assisted and autonomous, in a Spanish nursing home. The aim of the study has been to assess the acceptance, and the user experience, both in individual and group interaction with a voice assistant. Aspects analysed include the voice interaction difficulties encountered, the attitudes and emotions felt during interaction, the appropriateness of using games, the usefulness of the display and the feasibility of supporting group interaction. In spite of the challenges encountered, results have been promising, especially regarding group interaction. They have confirmed the feasibility of using voice assistants in nursing home contexts if interaction is adapted to residents’ characteristics and its use is always guided by a mediator.

Among the elements to consider when designing a video game, narrative stands out due to its importance in contextualizing and motivating. However, there are no standard processes for creating interactive digital narratives. In educational video games, a suitable narrative is even more essential to captivate players with a story, which serves as a vehicle for transmitting and evaluating knowledge. Consequently, this article proposes a narrative design process for video games, developed for general application but particularly useful for educational games. It defines a narrative structure, a set of design steps, and the documents generated during the process, each one representing a different perspective of the game’s narrative. To validate the proposal, a narrative-rich game called Time Invaders was designed to teach reading comprehension. It was tested with 237 school-age children, measuring their experience and satisfaction. The study revealed that the narrative was the most valued element of the game.

Groupware technology is an essential asset for organizations and a successful medium to support social meetings and teacher-learning processes when people are geographically distributed. Computer programming is a domain that can take advantage of the Collaborative Work paradigm and of this technology. However, to be truly effective, groupware systems must provide suitable awareness support, i.e., be capable of informing users of the activity taking place and of the team outcome, so that they can build a setting for their work. The study of awareness mechanisms and their influence on collaborative programming processes is an open research question. In this context, this article contributes an experimental study to evaluate the mechanisms to support coordination, communication, and awareness of COLLECE, a distributed group programming system rich in awareness support. This study brings as a novel approach the combination of subjective and objective information sources, specifically eye tracking techniques, and incorporates a heuristic evaluation of awareness support based on a well-known framework. Thanks to this experiment, we have been able to verify that this blended approach, in which users participate intensively, provides a more comprehensive and deeper assessment of awareness and other coordination and communication mechanisms, and thus a better understanding of how their use can influence the collaborative programming process and outcome (program or piece of software). The study has revealed strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement of the evaluated system, and has yielded concrete results as to which are the most useful awareness components of the user interface not related to the activity supported by the system (programming), these being the traffic lights; the easiest to use, such as the session panel; or the components that impose a greater cognitive load, such as the multi-scrollbar. Regarding the relationship between the supported awareness dimensions and the quality of the collaboration outcome (computer program), the results point to the need to adequately support the What-Artifact dimension, i.e., highlighting in which part of the shared workspace (the source code) the user with floor control is working.

Up to now, groupware has enjoyed a certain stability in terms of the users’ technical requirements, being the awareness dimension one of its key services to provide usability and improve collaboration. Nonetheless, currently, groupware technologies are being stressed: on the one hand, the pandemic of COVID-19 has greatly driven the massive use of groupware tools to overcome physical distancing; on the other hand, the new digital worlds (with disruptive devices, changing paradigms, and growing productive needs) are introducing new collaboration settings. This, and the fact that software engineering methods are not paying enough attention to the awareness, makes us concentrate on facilitating its design. Thus, we have created a visual modeling technique, based on a conceptual framework, to be used by the developers of groupware systems to describe awareness requirements. This visual language, called the awareness description diagrams, has been validated in some experimental activities. The results obtained show that this is a valid technique in order to model the awareness support, that it is useful and understandable for groupware engineers, and that the visual representation is preferred to a more textual one in terms of expressiveness.

In this paper, we study the influence of the roadmap topology and the number of vehicles when accounting for the vehicular communications capabilities, especially in urban scenarios. Additionally, we propose the use of two metrics: the SJ Ratio (SJR) and the Total Distance (TD), as the metrics that better correlate with communications performance. Hence, researchers will better characterize the different urban scenarios. In particular, simulation results demonstrate that roadmaps with both similar SJR and TD present similar communications performance in terms of vehicles informed.

Over the past few years, a great deal of work has been done in the field of collaborative software (groupware). Many fields of science have taken advantage of these developments, and Software Engineering is one such field. Within this scope, we have developed a domain independent synchronous collaborative tool that can be specialized to work with several types of diagrammatical domains. Among those domains, the diagrams used in the Unified Process can be found. In this paper we describe how we have specialized this tool to work with use case diagrams and how we have carried out an empirical study with this tool to obtain conclusions regarding several issues: the analysis of three kinds of communication among users, the relationship between types of communication and coordination among users, and the relationship between communication and the quality of the modeling work.

One of the most important aspects of groupware systems is the concept of awareness, which refers to the perception and knowledge of the group and its activities. This paper extends a previously developed ontology-based conceptualization for the development of user interfaces in groupware systems that support awareness. Specifically, we are interested in domain-independent design groupware. We propose an awareness ontology that conceptualizes the most important aspects of awareness in such systems and can be used to automatize the development of their user interfaces. In order to validate the usefulness of this ontology, we have related the concepts included in our ontology to the awareness dimensions exposed in a well-known awareness framework.

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for the design the groupware user interface. It supports the interface design enabling integration with software development processes through UML notation. We studied relevant proposals in the domain of CSCW and HCI. Taxonomy is defined in order to classify concepts from those proposals. Finally, the taxonomy is populated for defining main concepts of the conceptual framework.