“I Hear You”: Understanding Awareness Information Exchange in an Audio-only Workspace

2018. Oussama Metatla, Nick Bryan-Kinns & Tony Stockman
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

Graphical displays are a typical means for conveying awareness information in groupware systems to help users track joint activities, but are not ideal when vision is constrained. Understanding how people maintain awareness through non-visual means is crucial for designing effective alternatives for supporting awareness in such situations. We present a lab study simulating an extreme scenario where 32 pairs of participants use an audio-only tool to edit shared audio menus. Our aim is to characterise collaboration in this audio-only space in order to identify whether and how, by itself, audio can mediate collaboration. Our findings show that the means for audio delivery and choice of working styles in this space influence types and patterns of awareness information exchange. We thus highlight the need to accommodate different working styles when designing audio support for awareness, and extend previous research by identifying types of awareness information to convey in response to group work dynamics.

Read the full paper here ›

Citation

Metatla, O., Bryan-Kinns, N., & Stockman, T. (2018). “i hear you”: understanding awareness information exchange in an audio-only workspace. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–13). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174120, doi:10.1145/3173574.3174120

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3173574.3174120,
author = {Metatla, Oussama and Bryan-Kinns, Nick and Stockman, Tony},
title = {“I Hear You”: Understanding Awareness Information Exchange in an Audio-only Workspace},
year = {2018},
isbn = {9781450356206},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174120},
doi = {10.1145/3173574.3174120},
abstract = {Graphical displays are a typical means for conveying awareness information in groupware systems to help users track joint activities, but are not ideal when vision is constrained. Understanding how people maintain awareness through non-visual means is crucial for designing effective alternatives for supporting awareness in such situations. We present a lab study simulating an extreme scenario where 32 pairs of participants use an audio-only tool to edit shared audio menus. Our aim is to characterise collaboration in this audio-only space in order to identify whether and how, by itself, audio can mediate collaboration. Our findings show that the means for audio delivery and choice of working styles in this space influence types and patterns of awareness information exchange. We thus highlight the need to accommodate different working styles when designing audio support for awareness, and extend previous research by identifying types of awareness information to convey in response to group work dynamics.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {1–13},
numpages = {13},
keywords = {audio-only interaction, collaboration, workspace awareness},
location = {Montreal QC, Canada},
series = {CHI '18}
}