No abstract

Mobile cooperative systems canfacilitate cooperation by improving the flexibility of usage. However, mobile devices present some constraints that become the design and implementation of groupware systems harder. Additionally, there is a lack of general inteiface requirements definition and verification techniques for supporting the development of effective mobile groupware systems. This lack makes it more difficult to develop usable mobile groupware systems. In order to address some of these issues, we present a set of approaches for user inteiface design and requirements verification that can be used during the elaboration phase in the development of mobile cooperative applications.

Many approaches for requirements elicitation have been proposed to help the design of virtual collaborative systems. The design of virtual collaborative systems with collaborative sensemaking presents a challenge due to the needs of interaction of users with the system in order to process, interpret, and share information collaboratively. However, most of the design approaches fail in capturing the users' needs, because they are not designed to capture precisely the main users' activities interactions during the interplay between 'collaboration' and 'information' with sensemaking. Sensemaking determines the way in which people respond to certain events and allows constructing perceptions taking into account their goals, priorities and problems. This paper describes a requirement elicitation method that captures the interactions of potential users in collaborative environments with collaborative sensemaking activities. The method is based on the simulation of activities it was employed in the design of a virtual collaborative system -a collaborative puzzle -in order to illustrate its usage.