Revealing delay in collaborative environments

Abstract

Delay is an unavoidable reality in collaborative environments. We propose an approach to dealing with delay in which 'decorators' are introduced into the interface. Decorators show the presence, magnitude and effects of delay so that participants can better understand its consequences and adopt their own natural coping strategies. Two experiments with different decorators show that this approach can significantly reduce errors in specific collaborative activities. We conclude that revealing delays is one way in which groupware can benefit from accepting and working with the reality of distributed systems, rather than trying to maintain the illusion of copresent interaction.

The effects of local lag on tightly-coupled interaction in distributed groupware

“…Although Time Warp has been recommended for fast-paced games [5], the use of rollback can be distracting and confusing; locations of shared objects change suddenly, and users experience gaps in the ordering of events [10].…”

“…These are now common in many games, where information such as ping times show the delay for individual clients. Studies have shown that users are able to perform better when they are more informed in this way [7,10]. Decorators are an extension of this idea, and place indications in the game environment itself [22].…”

“…A variety of decorators have been designed to show information such as current latency or jitter, past and predicted future states, or reliability. These techniques have also been shown to improve user performance [10,22].…”

Studying the Effect of Delay on Group Performance in Collaborative Editing

“…However, similar to game-like tasks (e.g., [5]), the effect of delay on document editing, as measured by outcome, depends on strategy. A tightly coupled subtask decomposition that enhances outcome in the presence of minimal delay becomes detrimental at higher levels of delay, potentially less effective than a more loosely coupled task decomposition at the beginning of the task.…”

“…Both the avoidance and resolution of such interactions requires communication among the team members [4]. However, not all tasks are sensitive to delay [2] and users might pursue strategies that are not sensitive to delay, or they might adjust their strategies if they are aware of delay [5].…”