WYSIWIS revised

Abstract

WYSIWlS (What You See Is What I See) is a foundational abstraction for multi-user interfaces that expresses many of the characteristics of a chalkboard in face-to-face meetings. In its strictest interpretation, it means that everyone can see the same written information and also where anyone else is pointing.We present several examples of multi-user interfaces that start from the wYSIWlS abstraction. In our attempts to build software support for collaboration in meetings, we have discovered that wYsIWlS is at once crucial and too inflexible in its strictest sense. WYSlWlS must be relaxed for all our software tools to better accommodate important interactions in meetings. Relaxations to wYSIWlS are characterized in terms of constraints on its four key dimensions: display space, time of display, subgroup population, and congruence of view.

Information Display

“…The user interaction and communication models of such systems are, however, still based on Norman's gulf model [61]. According to this model, there are two information-processing devices (a computer and a user) connected to each other.…”