Social Aspects of Human- Computer Interaction Designing for collaboration and communication Chris Kelly

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication2 Overview  Conversation with others  Awareness of others  How to support people to be able to:  talk and socialise  work together  play and learn together  Applying this to HCI

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication3 How we communicate in conversations  Mechanisms and ‘rules’  Mutual greetings  A: “Hi”  B: “How are you”  A: “Good, how was your day”…  Turn-taking to coordinate conversations  Back channelling to signal to continue and following  Uh-uh, umm, ahh…  Farewell rituals  Bye then, see you, bye, see you later…  Implicit and explicit cues  e.g. looking at watch, fidgeting with coat and bags  explicitly saying “Oh dear, must go, look at the time, I’m late…”

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication4 Breakdowns in Conversation  When someone says something that is misunderstood  Speaker will repeat with emphasis:  A: “this one?”  B: “no, I meant that one!”  Also use tokens:  Eh? Quoi? Huh? What?  Repairing breakdowns in conversation  Repeat what was said  Use stronger intonations  Exaggerate hand and face gestures

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication5 Awareness of Others  Involves knowing who is around, what is happening, and who is talking with whom  Peripheral awareness  keeping an eye on things happening in the periphery of vision  Overhearing and overseeing - allows tracking of what others are doing without explicit cues

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication6 What about Technology mediated conversations?  Do the same conversational rules apply?  Different types of awareness.  Are there more breakdowns?  How do people repair them?  Phone   Instant Messaging  SMS Texting

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication7 Design Implications  How to support conversations when people are ‘at a distance’ from each other  Many applications have been developed  , videoconferencing, videophones, computer conferencing, instant messaging, chat rooms, collaborative virtual environments, media spaces  How effective are they?  Do they mimic or extend existing ways of conversing?

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication8 Computer Mediated Communication  Three types of CMC  Synchronous Communication  Asyncronous Communication  CMC combined with other activity

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication9 Synchronous computer-mediated communication  Conversations are supported in real-time through voice and/or typing  Examples include video conferencing and chatrooms  Benefits  Can keep more informed of what is going on  Video conferencing allows everyone to see each other providing some support for non-verbal communication  Chat rooms can provide a forum for shy people to talk more  Problems:  Video lacks bandwidth so there are judders and lots of shadows  Difficult to establish eye contact with images of others  People can behave badly when behind the mask of an avatar

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication10 Asynchronous communication  Communication takes place remotely at different times  , newsgroups, computer conferencing  Benefits include:  Read any place any time  Flexible as to how to deal with it  Powerful, can send to many people  Can make saying things easier  Problems include:  FLAMING!!! – i.e. angry, uninhibited s or postings  Spamming  Message overload  False expectations as to when people will reply  “You mean you don’t sit at your computer all day checking your ?!?!”

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication11 CMC combined with other activity  Communicating while carrying out other activities  Networked Classrooms, Shared Authoring and Drawing Tools  Benefits:  Allows for multitasking  Speed and efficiency, multiple people working on the same document at the same time  Greater awareness of progress  Problems:  WYSIWIS (what you see is what I see): hard to see what other people are referring to if at remote locations  Floor control: users wanting to work on the same section at the same time, can be resolved by various social and technological floor control policies, i.e. checking out a file.

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication12 New Communication Technologies  Move beyond trying to support face-to-face communication, improve awareness  Provide novel ways of interacting and talking  Examples include:  SMS text messaging via mobile phones  Online chatting in chat rooms  Collaborative virtual environments – The Sims  Media spaces – “extend the world of desks, chairs, walls and ceilings” (Harrison et al, 1997)

February 11, 2005Designing for collaboration and communication13 Review  Social mechanisms, like turn-taking, conventions, etc., enable us to collaborate and coordinate our activities  Keeping aware of what others are doing and letting others know what you are doing are important aspects of collaborative working and socialising  Many collaborative technologies (groupware or CSCW) systems have been built to support collaboration, especially communication and awareness