Visualizing history to improve users' location and comprehension of collaborative work

Abstract

Many applications place users into collaborations with unknown and distant partners. Collaboration between participants in such environments is more efficient if individuals can identify and understand the contributions of others. A traditional approach to supporting such understanding within the CSCW community is to record user activity for later access. Issues with this approach include difficulties in locating activity of interest in large tasks and that history is often recorded at a system-activity level instead of at a human-activity level. To address these issues, this paper introduces CoActIVE, a history mechanism that clusters records of user activity and extracts keywords from manipulated content in an attempt to provide a human-level representation of history. Multiple visualization techniques' based on this processing were compared in their ability to improve users' location and comprehension of the activity of others. The results show the combination of clustering low level history events into activity segments and new visualizations summarizing activity within a segment result in a significant improvement over prior interfaces.

QMaps: Engaging Students in Voluntary Question Generation and Linking

“…A similar problem has been noted in discussion forums with deep threading, where new contributions may be difficult to notice. The usual solution is some kind of chronological log of activity [34,70]. In our case, the Slack channel where students posted copies of question stems served as that log (see Figure 3).…”

Impression formation in online peer production

“…On one hand, making activity history visible can provide useful insight into details of behaviors that were inaccessible and encourage more careful review of difficult cases (Hansen et al, 2013). Being able to view the past work activity of collaborators can also help a new project member understand their collaborators' intentions and decisions through providing increased understanding of prior work history (D. Kim & Shipman, 2012).…”

Exploring the Role of Activity Trace Design on Evaluations of Online Worker Quality

“…This is characteristic of a general trend in online social settings, where we are starting to see activity streams as a widely used form of information about other Internet users [5]. In the context of online peer production, access to individuals' past behavior and history can benefit collaborations and jump-start interactions by indicating who knows what or who has done what [7]. Visualizing this information can also influence how we feel about other people [8].…”