TY - JOUR T1 - Social activity indicators for groupware JF - Computer Y1 - 1996 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S A1 - Starr, Brian KW - chat system KW - distributed groupware KW - expertise sharing systems KW - geographically dispersed people KW - social activity indicator KW - social computing KW - social computing systems KW - social information KW - social psychology theory KW - social visualizations KW - team mates KW - UI systems KW - user interfaces KW - user-interface functionality KW - work groups AB -

Suppose you're a member of a few development teams, working with people who are geographically dispersed. You're using distributed groupware to work with your team mates. How do you decide when to work on a project and when to ignore requests to work on a project, when there are enough users on the groupware system to bother using it, who is available to answer a question, and which applications should get the most real estate on your screen? To help answer these questions, distributed groupware systems must indicate something about the social world they represent-who is on the system and what they are doing. User interfaces for groupware (or computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) applications) must therefore convey social information. It's energizing to know, for example, that your team mates are busy working away on a project. And it's nice to know when your friends or colleagues are available on a chat system. You might not need to know the semantics of the messages or documents involved, just that some activity is occurring. This is true for systems used by work groups as well as those used by an organization or a community of users. We think such social indicators should be a standard part of the CSCW user interface. On the basis of social psychology theory, we believe that a class of social indicator, which we call social activity indicators, is a simple, powerful way to improve user-interface functionality. Furthermore, social activity indicators are easy to build.

VL - 29 UR - Complete-OnlyDOI ER - TY - CONF T1 - Social Activity Indicators: Interface Components for CSCW Systems T2 - Proceedings of the 8th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface and Software Technology (UIST'95) Y1 - 1995 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Starr, Brian KW - awareness KW - human-computer interfaces KW - information systems KW - social activity KW - social UX KW - user interfaces KW - visualization AB -

Knowing what social activity is occurring within and through a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) system is often very useful. This is especially true for computer-mediated communication systems such as chat and other synchronous applications. People will attend to these systems more closely when they know that there is interesting activity on them. Interface mechanisms for indicating social activity, however, are often ad-hoc, if present at all. This paper argues for the importance of displaying social activity as well as proposes a generalized mechanism for doing so. This social activity indication mechanism is built upon a new CSCW toolkit, the Cafe ConstructionKit, and the Cafe ConstructionKit provides a number of important facilities for making construction of these indicators easy and straight-forward. Accordingly, this paper presents both the Cafe ConstructionKit as a CSCW toolkit as well as a mechanism for creating activity indicators.

JF - Proceedings of the 8th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface and Software Technology (UIST'95) UR - Complete ER -