Current business conditions have given rise to distributed teams that are mostly collocated except for one remote member. These "hub-and-satellite" teams face the challenge of the satellite colleague being out-of-sight and out-of-mind. We developed a telepresence device, called an Embodied Social Proxy (ESP), which represents the satellite coworker 24x7. Beyond using ESPs in our own group, we deployed an ESP in four product teams within our company for six weeks. We studied how ESP was used through ethnographic observations, surveys, and usage log data. ESP not only increased the satellite worker's ability to fully participate in meetings, it also increased the hub's attention and affinity towards the satellite. The continuous physical presence of ESP in each team improved the interpersonal social connections between hub and satellite colleagues.

As part of a focus on electronic publications, we undertook an exploratory study of how people saved and used the information they encountered while reading. In particular, we wanted to understand the role of clipping and whether it would be a necessary form of interaction with electronic publications. We interviewed 20 diverse individuals at home and at work, bringing together narrative accounts and physical and digital examples to investigate how people currently collect and use clippings from their everyday reading. All study participants had examples of materials they had deliberately saved from periodicals, ranging from ads torn from newspapers and URLs received in email messages to large stacks of magazines. Participants rarely read periodicals specifically to clip but rather recognized items of interest when they were encountered. The work highlights the importance of encountering information as an activity distinct from task-focused browsing and searching and reveals design implications for online reading and clipping technologies.

We introduced detail-on-demand video as a simple type of hypervideo that allows users to watch short video segments and to follow hyperlinks to see additional detail. Such video lets users quickly access desired information without having to view the entire contents linearly. A challenge for presenting this type of video is to provide users with the appropriate affordances to understand the hypervideo structure and to navigate it effectively. Another challenge is to give authors tools that allow them to create good detail-on-demand video. Guided by user feedback, we iterated designs for a detail-on-demand video player. We also conducted two user studies to gain insight into people's understanding of hypervideo and to improve the user interface. We found that the interface design was tightly coupled to understanding hypervideo structure and that different designs greatly affected what parts of the video people accessed. The studies also suggested new guidelines for hypervideo authoring.

The articles in this special issue on "talking about things" address very different aspects of conversations around objects in computer-mediated collaborative environments. Although the authors have similar goals, they differ widely in the part of the problem space they tackle. The authors choose different ways to address common grounding and shared understanding in their study plans and environments. The articles raise a paradox between the need to see things while talking about them and the lack of demonstrated success when doing so in CMC environments. When conversations include physical objects, a computer-mediated collaborative environment must be able to allow a representation and transformation of those objects in the conversation. The extent to which this is accomplished in a way that minimizes the loss of shared context and shared experience will provide the ability to talk about things remotely in a useful way.

Quiet Calls is a technology allowing mobile telephone users to respond to telephone conversations without talking aloud. QC-Hold, a Quiet Calls prototype, combines three buttons for responding to calls with a PDA/mobile phone unit to silently send pre-recorded audio directly into the phone. This permits a mixed-mode communication where callers in public settings use a quiet means of communication, and other callers experience a voice telephone call. An evaluation of QC-Hold shows that it is easily used and suggests ways in which Quiet Calls offers a new form of communication, extending the choices offered by synchronous phone calling and asynchronous voicemail.

This paper describes an application-independent tool called Anchored Conversations that brings together text-based conversations and documents. The design of Anchored Conversations is based on our observations of the use of documents and text chats in collaborative settings. We observed that chat spaces support work conversations, but they do not allow the close integration of conversations with work documents that can be seen when people are working together face-to-face. Anchored Conversations directly addresses this problem by allowing text chats to be anchored into documents. Anchored Conversations also facilitates document sharing; accepting an invitation to an anchored conversation results in the document being automatically uploaded. In addition, Anchored Conversations provides support for review, catch-up and asynchronous communications through a database. In this paper we describe motivating fieldwork, the design of Anchored Conversations, a scenario of use, and some preliminary results from a user study.

No abstract available.

The development of tools to support synchronous communications between non-collocated colleagues has received considerable attention in recent years. Much of the work has focused on increasing a sense of co-presence between interlocutors by supporting aspects of face-to-face conversations that go beyond mere words (e.g. gaze, postural shifts). In this regard, a design goal for many environments is the provision of as much media-richness as possible to support non-collocated communication. In this paper we present results from our most recent interviews studying the use of a text-based virtual environment to support work collaborations. We describe how such an environment, though lacking almost all the visual and auditory cues known to be important in face-to-face conversation, has played an important role in day-to-day communication. We offer a set of characteristics we feel are important to the success of this text-only tool and discuss issues emerging from its long-term use.

A study of a spatially distributed product design team shows that most members are rarely at their individual desks.Mobility is essential for the use of shared resources and for communication.It facilitates informal interactions and awareness unavailable to colleagues at remote sites.Implications for technology design include portable and distributed computing resources, in particular, moving beyond individual workstation-centric CSCW applications.

This full-day workshop will focus on understanding the range of ways in which the Internet and the Web are being used for collaboration, on the communities using it, and on how (and what) CSCW tools are appearing in this domain. The workshop will strive to characterize current on-line collaborations and their underlying technologies and to outline the implications of these for CSCW and distributed groups more generally.

No abstract available.

We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can support distributed work groups through access to information that supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is “around”, what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures—all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites.

A multi-user drawing tool was used by participants in a distributed design exercise conducted in a multi-media working environment.The goal of the study was to explore how observations from our earlier studies of shared drawing in two-person design activity would hold up when three participants worked together.Additionally, the study provided opportunities to contrast video/audio connections with audio-only connections and to discover new behaviors that emerge in the use of new technologies.Participants successfully used the shared drawing system with no observed difficulties attributable to the addition of a third user.Audio-only connections appeared to adequately suppofi this work activity, but details of the participants' interactions in the exercise raised questions that deserve further study.Finally, observations suggest that drawing tools such as the one reported here may offer support for alternative forms of participation in collaborative work.

Two-person design sessions were studied in three different settings: face-to-face, geographically separated with an audio/video link, and a telephone-only connection. In all settings, the designers' uses of a drawing surface were noted. Many similar drawing surface activities occurred in all design settings even though the settings did not each allow for the same sharing and interaction with the drawing surfaces. Observations suggest that the process of creating drawings may be as important to the design process as the drawings themselves. These preliminary results raise issues for further study, particularly with respect to computer support for collaborative drawing surface use.

It is widely believed that overlapping windows are preferable to tiled (non-overlapping) ones, but there is very little research to support that belief. An analysis of the basic characteristics of windowing regimes predicts that there are, in fact, situations where overlapping windows are inferior to tiled. An experiment to test this prediction verified that there are indeed tasks and users for which tiled windows yield faster performance. This result suggests a need for closer study of the principles underlying windowing regimes, so that designers have a better understanding of the tradeoffs involved in using them.

The Communicating with Sound panel for CHI '85 will focus on ways of expanding the user interface by using sound as a significant means of output. As a user's communication from the computer has progressed from large (and often smeary) printout to a teletypewriter and, finally, to the multi-window workstation displays of today, the emphasis has remained primarily on visual output. Although many user terminals and workstations have the capability of generating sound, that capability is rarely used for more than audio cues (indicating status such as an error condition or task completion) and simple musical tunes. Research shows that sounds convey meaningful information to users. With examples of such research, the panel members will demonstrate a variety of uses of sound output, discuss issues raised by the work, and suggest further directions. The intent of the panel is to stimulate thinking about expanding the user interface and to discuss areas for future research.

In the past few years, the increase in interactive use of computers has led to an emphasis on human factors and the ways in which digital information can best be presented to users. Computer graphics has been at the forefront of this growth involving vision as an active aid in interpreting data. Bar charts, psuedo-color image processing, and 3-dimensional figures are but a few means of providing the viewer with data information.