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Evaluating teamwork support in tabletop groupware applications using collaboration usability analysis

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Abstract

Tabletop groupware systems have natural advantages for collaboration, but they present a challenge for application designers because shared work and interaction progress in different ways than in desktop systems. As a result, tabletop systems still have problems with usability. We have developed a usability evaluation technique, T-CUA, that focuses attention on teamwork issues and that can help designers determine whether prototypes provide adequate support for the basic actions and interactions that are fundamental to table-based collaboration. We compared T-CUA with expert review in a user study where 12 evaluators assessed an early tabletop prototype using one of the two evaluation methods. The group using T-CUA found more teamwork problems and found problems in more areas than those using expert review; in addition, participants found T-CUA to be effective and easy to use. The success of T-CUA shows the benefits of using a set of activity primitives as the basis for discount usability techniques.

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Abbreviations

CUA:

Collaboration usability analysis

T-CUA:

Table-collaboration usability analysis

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV, 89154-4019, USA

    David Pinelle

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, 176 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5C9, Canada

    Carl Gutwin

Authors
  1. David Pinelle
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  2. Carl Gutwin
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Correspondence to David Pinelle or Carl Gutwin.

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Pinelle, D., Gutwin, C. Evaluating teamwork support in tabletop groupware applications using collaboration usability analysis. Pers Ubiquit Comput 12, 237–254 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-007-0145-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-007-0145-4

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