Incorporating Human and Machine Interpretation of Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness Into the Design of Collaborative Applications

ABSTRACT

Efficient coordination of collaboration requires sharing information about collaborators' current and future availability. We describe the usage of an awareness system called Awarenex that shared real-time awareness information to help coordinate activities at the current moment. We also developed a prototype called Lilsys that used sensors to gather additional awareness information that would help avoid disruptions when users are currently unavailable for interaction. Our experiences over time in designing and using prototypes that share awareness cues for current availability led us to identify temporal patterns that could help predict future reachability. Rhythm awareness is having a sense of regularly recurring temporal patterns that can help coordinate interactions among collaborators. Rhythm awareness is difficult to establish within distributed groups that are separated by distance and time zone. We describe rhythmic temporal patterns observed in activity data collected from users of the Awarenex prototype. Analyzing logs of Awarenex usage over time enabled us to construct a computational model of temporal patterns. We explored how to apply those patterns and model to predict future reachability among distributed team members. We discuss trade-offs in the design of collaborative applications that rely on human- and machine-interpretation of rhythm awareness cues. We also conducted a design study that elicited reactions to a variety of end-user visualizations of rhythmic patterns and investigated how well our computational model characterized their everyday routines.

Notes

Acknowledgments. We thank our colleagues at Sun Labs—Nicole Yankelovich, Helen Cunningham, and Randy Smith—for discussion and insights. We also thank the interns who contributed to the development of the systems described here: Mark Bilezikjian, Rosco Hill, and Nicholas Matsakis. We also thank the many users of Awarenex over time, especially those who shared their logs of Awarenex usage that enabled us to see rhythmic patterns in their activity.

Authors' Present Addresses. James “Bo” Begole, Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304. [email protected]. John C. Tang, IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120. [email protected].

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received December 2, 2005. Revisions received April 13, 2006, September 23, 2006, and September 27, 2006. Accepted by Panos Markopoulos, Boris de Ruyter, and Wendy Mackay. Final manuscript received October 12, 2006. —Editor