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Do visualizations improve synchronous remote collaboration?

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Information visualizations can improve collaborative problem solving, but this improvement may depend on whether visualizations promote communication. In an experiment on the effect of network visualizations, remote pairs worked synchronously to identify a serial killer. They discussed disparate evidence distributed across the pair using IM. Four conditions, respectively, offered (a) spreadsheet only (controls), (b) individual unshared visualizations, (c) view-only shared visualizations, and (d) a full-access shared visualization of all evidence. We examined collaborative performance, use of the visualization tool, and communication as a function of condition. All visualization conditions improved remote collaborators' performance over the control condition. Full access to a shared visualization best facilitated remote collaboration by encouraging tool use and fostering discussion between the partners. Shared visualization without full access impaired performance somewhat and made communication even more vital to identifying the serial killer. This study provides direct evidence of visualization tool features and partner behavior that promote collaboration.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
1870 pages
ISBN:9781605580111
DOI:10.1145/1357054
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. communication
  3. cscw
  4. distributed work
  5. empirical studies
  6. information visualization

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