We analyze how physically collocated teams work together now and what services they require to work together across distances, focusing on real time interactions because those interactions justify collocating teams today.We explain how Integrated Product Teams 0PT.s) are organized in system development programs and how their physical collocation facilitates communication, collaboration, and coordination within the team.Interactions witbin IPTs take two forms: scheduled meetings and opportunistic interactions.Scenarios of scheduled IPT meetings help motivate and identify requirements for supporting distributed meetings.Opportunistic interactions are far more common than scheduled meetings, and more difficult to observe and analyze because they are not scheduled or predictable.

This paper presents a pilot study that addresses the effect that device technology has on the usability of advanced telephone functions. We prototyped telephone systems using three technologies: the current 12-button phone set, the current phone set augmented with speech synthesis, and a phone set augmented with a display and pointing device. The functions that we offered included call routing, call screening, and message retrieval. Experiments showed that a display-based phone was the fastest to use and was preferred; an interface that used voice-prompting was the slowest and least liked. This points out that future work on prompting interfaces will have to address user control and efficiency issues without causing learning/forgetting problems.

All discussions of interface design criteria emphasize the importance of consistent operating procedures both within and across applications. This paper presents a model for positive transfer and thus a theoretical definition of consistency. An experiment manipulating training orders for utility tasks was designed to evaluate the transfer model. The experimental manipulations produced large transfer effects. Quantitative predictions were derived from the Kieras and Polson (1985) theory of human-computer interaction and the transfer model and fit using regression techniques. The transfer model accounted for 88% of the variance of the 31 cell means.