DESIGNING COLLABORATIVE USER INTERFACES: LESSONS FROM WRITER/GRAPHIC DESIGNER INTERACTION

Recent discussions about designing and building user interfaces for collaborative work have revealed a number of points. One of the most significant is that before we can concentrate on collaborative interfaces, we still have much to learn about the nature of collaboration itself. In particular, we need information from studies that have systematically looked at interdisciplinary collaboration in real contexts, with real people and problems. Thus, the goals of my research are to deeply understand one kind of interdisciplinary collaborative work -the activities of a document design team working on a client project - and then to produce guidelines for computer support of the interactions studied.