Encountering Awareness Information with GroupSense Displays and Tools Andreas Dieberger, Bogdan Dorohonceanu*, Stephen Farrell, Beverly Harrison, Eser Kandogan, Thomas P. Moran, Barton A. Smith IBM Almaden Research Center Computer Science Department & CAIP Center* 650 Harry Road Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA San Jose, CA 95120 USA {andreasd, sfarrell, bevharr, eser, tpmoran, basmith}@us.ibm.com ABSTRACT
GroupSense is a suite of awareness tools for a medium size workgroup. GroupSense shows people’s daily in/out state and other information of interest, such as talk announcements. Contrary to instant messengers and most other awareness tools, GroupSense is intended to show state changes that occur infrequently and tend to span longer time intervals (e.g. a whole day, or week). We observed that such a system requires a different approach to representing awareness information than is commonly used in awareness applications. Information needs to become part of the work environment omnipresent in both physical and electronic worlds such that people stumble over it. We are proposing to demonstrate a variety of tools and information displays that support group awareness at various common physical and digital locations in the workplace. Keywords
Awareness, Ambient Display, Omnipresent Awareness. GROUPSENSE
About to leave for a long-deserved vacation? You ought to let your co-workers known about your trip. You can send e-mail to a group of select people at work, turn on the vacation auto-reply feature of your e-mail tool, post a note on your door, send out an instant message, and most importantly let your manager/administrator know about it. Perhaps you should do all of the above to improve your chances of notifying your colleagues in a variety of situations in physical and electronic worlds. GroupSense (GS) is a suite of awareness tools and information displays to share whereabouts information with your colleagues. Contrary to common instant messenger type applications, GS does not provide messaging. People inform the system on plans to be IN or OUT of the office, to attend – for example – a conference, to go on vacation, or to work from home.
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Additional information can be posted as INFO notes. These notes might convey supplemental information such as “coming in late” to convey slight changes to users daily schedule, “reachable at (408) nnn-nnnn” or “reviewing papers all day” to provide accessibility or availability information. Most people provide a background posting for regular workdays, such as “Typically in 9-6 M-F.” These get overridden by OUT postings and amended by occasional INFO postings. The system is designed to be free form and lightweight. Our goal was to explore whether such a system could still be useful for coordinating group activity. It is important to point out that the IN/OUT state conveys a predominant state on a day. If I plan to have a regular workday at the office, I’m IN. This does not mean I am physically at my desk all-day. GS tracks availability at a broader level rather than minute-to-minute. By convention people do not post a state for weekends or holidays, unless they specifically want to say that they are IN or OUT. This represents an implicit OUT state. People typically post just for themselves, but it is possible to post on behalf of another person. One example of this is when someone is at home sick and has let a colleague know who then posts this information on GroupSense. Additionally each group contains a virtual member called “ news”. People post talk announcements and notes of general interest as an INFO note to news. GS covers two key concepts in awareness: presence and “futurence”. Presence gives information about a person’s current state and availability in time to assist users in planning their actions right now. “Futurence”, on the other hand, is an awareness of a person’s near term future activities and might have implications for their availability (e.g., Bob is on holiday tomorrow and next week so I had best contact him today). Information about this near term activity can be crucial in coordinating group activity. GroupSense client
GS began as a dedicated client that was placed on top of the WindowsTM taskbar to provide awareness information on the desktop (Figure 1). The client consisted of a
number of person-icons representing the status of myself and my collaborators -- people I want to stay aware of constantly. In addition, group-icons provide status of the entire group as a compact grid visualization. Brush-overs on person-icons show a larger picture and today’s notes. The client also provides a gallery view of the entire group and a monthly calendar view.
horse or a man in a submarine. For OUT state people preferred more stationary objects or living things such as a starfish or a clam. Tapping a fish displays a person’s current note. We experimented with showing “futurence” by changing a fish’s tail fin based on tomorrow’s state. We found this representation was not obvious enough. Also a one day preview was not sufficiently useful in terms of time horizon.
Figure 1. The GroupSense awareness bar provides peripheral awareness of colleagues’ status. Brushovers provide more detailed information about a colleague or group. We encountered many problems with this client, mostly due to the large number of different platforms used in our group. This kept the system from gaining a broad user base early on. Cultivating the physical environment
We soon realized that we had to make GS more visible. The USER commons, a gathering and meeting place for our group contains a large (5x3 feet) plasma display with a touch screen. It is frequently used for presentations, demos or as a collaborative workspace. We built an webbased GS gallery that, along with other information pages, is shown when the display is not used for collaboration.
Figure 2. GroupSense fish tank showing awareness information in a pleasant natural visualization. The fish tank is located right outside the Commons area -a place people pass many times during a typical work day. The tank is not only a great conversation piece for visitors, but effortlessly conveys awareness information in the environment.
This installment made GS information very visible to the group and had a number of interesting effects. The gallery made it obvious when people had not set their state or pictures in GS. We frequently overheard people teasing each other before meetings about their “unknown” GS state or their lack of a photo. We believe that the constant visual reminder motivated some people to finally get on the system and use it more regularly. Also around this time we first noticed group members referring to colleague’s GS states in conversations. We think the prime reason for the gallery’s success was the fact that people didn’t have to do anything to check GS – the information was readily available in the world. Encouraged by this success we explored other ways to cultivate GS in the physical environment. One of us built a virtual fish tank, which is running on another large display with touch screen. He extended this fish tank [1] to represent GS state (Figure 2): People who are IN show up as swimming fish. People who are OUT show up as stationary objects at the bottom of the tank. By default, fish carry an image of their user, but can be personalized through skins for IN and OUT states. Most users kept their default appearance, but a few changed their appearance to a variety of “fish” types, such as a sea
Figure 3. GroupSense awareness information incorporated into a colleague’s door panel. GroupSense door-panels (Figure 3) are another way to encounter awareness information. It is not uncommon that you go to a colleague’s office only to find a sticky note which says she is out for a couple of days. Door-panels enrich the work place by incorporating awareness information with other information such as pictures from a recent trip, images from recently visited websites, calendar schedule, etc. GroupSense as a service provides
user’s information in html and xml form, which makes it easy to incorporate awareness information into a variety of displays.
People encounter or “stumble over” these reports in their electronic work environments just as they encounter the fish tank or a door panel in the physical environment.
Cultivating the digital environment
GS state changes within a day are rare. This significantly impacts the ideal representation of awareness information. People care about others being “back in the office” or “going on a trip”, but they are less interested in state changes during a day. The success of the email GS report indicates that “awareness moments”, as described in [2], can occur using very coarse grain awareness as is provided by GS (day level as opposed to minute level.)
A web based GS gateway (Figure 4) soon replaced the original GS client. It is now the main method to put information into GS and allows people to create, edit, update postings, add, remove collaborators, etc. It also provides access to group galleries and “futurence” (a weekly preview shown in the lower right of Figure 4.)
Overall Usage patterns
Figure 4. The GroupSense Web Gateway provides all the functionality to create, edit, update postings; add, remove collaborators; and view both presence and futurence information. As in the physical environment, we wanted to make GS information available without effort so that people could stumble over it. Our solution is an email-based GS report sent out every morning as shown in Figure 5. To be both concise and to provide useful “futurence” this report differs significantly from other GS representations. It does not list obvious information (“another typical day at the office”). Instead it shows who is out today, what is new, and what is upcoming in the next two weeks. The report shows, for instance, when somebody will be returning from a trip, or when somebody is about to go out of town. The email report was found to be very valuable, because it summarized important details at a glance.
System logs were analyzed for the Groupsense system over an 11 month period. During this time, 19 of 21 full time employees in our lab and 7 of 11 summer interns used the system. Posting patterns are summarized in the table below. The number of posting per user varied highly with the intensive users being those most closely associated with the project. In general, users tended to only rarely post items to either news or on behalf of others with 2 notable exceptions: the person who ran lab seminars posted the seminar speaker each week (79 postings) and the lab admin assistant regularly posted information about the lab manager (74 postings). Otherwise, these latter two types of postings tended to numbers less than 10 in total per user (over the 11 month tracking period). Postings could be assigned a state where in = 135 postings in total, out = 281 postings in total, and info = 303 postings across all users of the system. # posting by a single user
average
median
range
About themselves
19
12
2 to 62
On behalf of others
16
4
2 to 79
To news
16
3
2 to 74
Table 1. System usage statistics. Types of Postings
Figure 5 Daily e-mail report from GroupSense showing who is out today, what is new, and what is upcoming in the next two weeks in different sections of the report. People tend to check their email first thing in the morning. Thus, our email-based report provides awareness information in the (electronic) workplace.
Postings to news were used to announce lab meetings (or cancelled meetings), announce the weekly speaker/topic, announce lab visitors or new summer interns, or remind people of upcoming company holidays. Messages posted on behalf of others served 2 purposes: (1) they were used to correct an otherwise inaccurate status (for instance, Bob’s status indicated that he was out of the office and someone sees Bob in the hall and posts “actually he’s here”, someone in the lab realizes Karen is actually on a business trip and forgot to mention it and posts “on business trip at Watson” with the dates she’ll be away, someone calls in sick to a colleague and the colleague posts “out with a cold today”), or (2) the admin assistant posts information about the lab manager’s travel
schedule, where he is, when he’s out of the office, and when he will be in. Finally, a large variety of messages was posted with information by users about themselves. In status messages tended to be used to indicate a person’s typical work day/schedule (e.g., “generally here 9 to 6”, “Regular work day. Usually in ~10am to ~8pm”). Out status messages were used when people worked from home, were on vacation, at conferences, or on business trips. These messages tended to include both the destination and the purpose of the event and frequently included contact information (e.g., “working from home (408) nnn-nnnn”, “On vacation in Pennsylvania – contact tel# (610) nnn-nnnn”, “In Philadelphia for BlueBoard demo at CIO conference”, “at IBM Austin Research Lab”, “out of office Friday – not reading email”). Info messages were used to indicate special events that would occupy people for large blocks of time during the day or changes in people’s daily work day hours (e.g., “attending IT for Life Sciences conference in Auditorium”, “leaving at 2:00pm today”, “I’ll be in around noon today”, “in video conf most of the day”). There were several types of postings that were somewhat surprising. Some users posted “warning” messages about impending holidays or trips to forewarn colleagues of absences even though they did not yet have the exact details and dates (e.g., “will take some vacation days in January not sure when yet”, “will be away around Easter”, “we’re planning a week’s vacation sometime in February”). Some users posted messages to indicate that they were NOT at a conference or business trip – usually in cases where the logical assumption would be that their whole team was likely to be away (e.g., “I am NOT at chi”, “I will NOT be in Westford next week”). Some users posted fairly detailed information of a more
personal nature about events (e.g., “Feeding my soul at the SF Flower and Garden show”, “have to leave for a doctor’s apmt at 2pm”, “back on the east coast for my sister’s graduation”, “visiting Grand Canyon with my parents”, “attending all day off-site mtg (ugh)!”). Finally, the system was also sometimes used to provide information to the whole group that could have been sent by email but somehow email seemed too formal and Groupsense was used as an informal broadcast system (e.g., one intern upon leaving posted her status as out for the rest of the year but included her contact email address at the university, one employee posted an office move “I moved to B2-266”). SUMMARY
GS has been in use in our group of about 21 people for almost a year. While it is difficult to measure the success of such systems we believe it has been successful since it was integrated into our daily practices. One good indication of its success is the complaint messages we get during occasional outages. We believe that its success can be mostly attributed to the availability of the awareness information that typically crosses our paths in the workplace at various common physical and digital locations. While GS does not tie into an existing calendaring system at this point, it seems an obvious extension in future versions. REFERENCES
[1] S. Farrell: Social and Informational Proxies in a Fishtank, ACM CHI 2001 short papers, pp. 365-366. [2] B.A. Nardi, S. Wittaker, E. Bradner: Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action, ACM CSCW 2000, pp. 79-88.
