The effects of mutual location-awareness on group coordination

Abstract

The importance of space and place in collaborative practices has been strengthened with the ubiquitous computing paradigm, which aims at the integration of computation in physical objects and places. New location-based applications allow users to know where other individuals are in the physical world. New collaborative applications engage users in geographically dispersed and mobile activities. However, there is still a lack of information concerning how mutual location-awareness (i.e. knowing partners’ whereabouts) might influence socio-cognitive processes involved in coordination. To address this issue, we conducted field experiments with a mobile and collaborative game, running on Tablet PCs, and compared two interfaces. On the first interface, groups received automatic updates from teammates’ whereabouts, while this automatic MLA tool was not provided by the second interface. In addition, all users could use their Tablet PCs to communicate by annotating the map. We found no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. However, contrary to our expectations, players without automatic MLA had a better representation of their partners’ paths, wrote more messages and provided more elaborate explanations of their strategies. Additionally, automatic location-awareness undermined the coordination process, leading participants to be less articulate about their strategy. The paper discusses these results and the implications of such results.

Introduction

For several decades, researchers and engineers proposed to use spatial metaphors in order to support human–computer interaction using concepts such as the “desktop” organization or web “sites” and “chatrooms”. The importance of space and place has been made more relevant with the ubiquitous computing paradigm, which aims at the integration of computation in physical objects and places (Weiser, 1991). Among other technologies in this domain, there is a surge of location-based services, which is to say mobile applications that take advantage of location information in various contexts like supporting group coordination, playing games or engaging users in learning activities (see Benford, 2005 for a review). The recent democratization of these services leads to a new feature called mutual location-awareness (MLA in the remainder of this paper): users can be informed of their own and/or their teammates’ locations. MLA raises interesting issues already studied within the CSCW community, such as how collaboration can benefit from interfaces that convey awareness of others. Dourish and Bellotti (1992) defined awareness as: “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity” (p. 107). Drawing on this definition, location-awareness would be the understanding of the others’ position in the spatial environment. Gutwin and Greenberg (2002) stressed that awareness is knowledge about the state of the work environment in a limited portion of time and space. Since this information was not available in many collaborative applications, designers provided users with so-called “awareness tools.” These tools were expected to facilitate team collaboration by showing information about presence (is anyone in the workspace?), about their identity (who is that?), about their location (where is an individual?), about their actions (what is somebody doing?), and so forth. MLA is a specific category of awareness tools that provide the “where” information, i.e. the locations of each group member (Dyck and Gutwin, 2001). What is meant by “location” takes different forms; it can be a text message that indicates a person’s whereabouts or dots on a map. The adjective “mutual” covers knowing both one’s own location and the location of partners. It implies a notion of reciprocity: if person A may see her partners B and C’s location, then B and C also have access to A’s location (not necessarily in real time).

Different MLA interfaces have been developed: they differ in terms of methods for capturing the location (automatic versus self-disclosed), functions for posting a query (e.g. querying who is where and when) and how the information is rendered to the users. Most of the MLA interfaces use a visual output, often on a map, sometimes as textual description and in a few cases with more innovative visualizations. Past research about the role of MLA in collaborative virtual environments have shown that it supported implicit coordination and division of labor (Dillenbourg and Traum, 1997), as well as mutual understanding of each other’s intents (Nova et al., 2007).

MLA also relates to the communication practice of giving or asking geographical information in cell phone conversations. Various studies have shown that it helps people to mutually establish and share a spatio-temporal context (Laurier, 2001), allow group coordination for meetings (Weilenmann, 2003) or be an index of interactional availability (Arminen, 2006). Given the importance of this phenomenon, Arminen claims that a technical solution to indicate location-awareness would have a wide applicability for a majority of mobile users.

Although numerous mobile applications implemented and tested MLA interfaces, there have been few experiments to understand their effects on collaboration. Existing studies put more emphasis on the design than on the empirical investigation of how users’ behavior is influenced by knowing where the partners or the competitors are located. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study aimed at investigating the influence of MLA on group coordination in mobile settings. More specifically, we compared two interfaces that provide users with location-awareness: on the first interface, groups received automatic updates from teammates’ whereabouts, while this automatic MLA tool was not provided by the second interface. Using these two categories of interface, we investigated group cognitive processes such as communication and the representation each team member makes about one another, which allows groups to coordinate when performing a joint activity.

This paper first describes the related work about how socio-cognitive processes are impacted by MLA interfaces. The second section presents the theoretical framework we used to investigate this issue. After a brief description of our research scope, we detail the field experiment we conducted to understand the influence of MLA on collaboration. Finally, the last section discusses the outcomes and their consequences for practitioners.