CSCW Project Proposal
Usability enhancements to a shared whiteboard application
Teck-Lee Tung
Sep. 29, 97
Introduction and Problems
MediaBoard [1] is a shared whiteboard application that allows multiple users on the Internet to share an electronic drawing space. Currently, the application has been used during weekly lectures in a class here at Berkeley as well as in some other smaller-scale team collaboration settings. We observed some usability problems with the tool during these uses. The primary purpose of this project is to address these problems by modifying the existing implementation and adding new features.
Analysis and Proposed Design
Awareness of activitiesThe drawing space in MediaBoard is being divided into multiple pages, with one page being displayed at one time. Each individual page in MediaBoard is an infinite sheet. Each user sees only a portion of the page if the displayed window is too small. Users are free to draw on any of the pages and anywhere on each of the pages. MediaBoard currently has a mechanism for automatically switching to the page that has new activity. In a session where there are a substantial number of pages and parallel activities, this can be distracting since it would cause frequent switching of the displayed page. In addition, in a seminar-style session, users wanted MediaBoard to show the page currently displayed on the presenter’s MediaBoard but there is no mechanism to support that in the current tool. An associated problem is that users may not notice activities on the same page if the activities are not in his or her current view.
Proposed solution
We plan to introduce indicators of activities. For activities on the current page but not on display, we will flash the border(s) in the direction of activity. For activity on different pages, we would possibly flash the entries representing the pages in the page list window. For tracking displayed views of participants, we plan to add user interface elements that display the current page each participant is viewing. There can also be an option to make the displayed page follow that being displayed by a given participant.
Distinguishing between items drawn by different participants is currently done using different colors, or by explicitly signing the annotations. There is also a window displayed by the tool that highlights the name of the person currently drawing on the page. This is useful for participants who are viewing the page when the drawing happens. However, people who switch to the page later or did not have the separate window up have no means of identifying the creator of each item.
Proposed solution
We plan to introduce small banners showing the names of the users that will be displayed temporary next to the currently drawn item. In addition, we plan to add a feature to MediaBoard that will enable the user to display either the banners for individual items or all items on a page.
MediaBoard currently does not have any interface for reviewing the progress of a session. For example, it does not allow the user to rewind or forward the state of the display to another instance of time. This prevents new comers to a session from easily figuring out what happened during a session. In addition, this prevents users from being able to see views of the MediaBoard that are synchronized with the other media streams, during playback of recorded streams.
Proposed solution
We plan a slider for positioning the display to a given instance of time. Possibly, the user can define a "playback speed" that allows automatic advance of the time and thus animate the progress. In addition, we will add hooks in the implementation that will allow integration into the playback tools, and thus enable synchronized random positioning during playback.
In addition, we would like to add an option for saving the state of MediaBoard, so that it can be reloaded and reviewed after a session. This would allow things like savaging [2] of recorded sessions and adding of annotations.
Experiment
The main purpose of the experiment would be to find the difference in the usability of the MediaBoard, before and after the enhancements are made. The independent variables would thus be the enhancements. The dependent variables that we want to measure would be the effectiveness of the enhancements, i.e. how much will people be more aware of activity, feel more about the presence, etc. Since these concepts are mostly intangible, the best way to measure them will be to use surveys. Ideally, we would want a wide range of people who will use it in different settings, ranging from one way seminar style presentations to the more symmetric group decision making settings. Given the constraints time and resources, we would try to get the CSCW class participants to make use of the new tools as they are being developed. Possibly, we could give out surveys to find out about the effectiveness of the enhancements. For people who have used the tools in the current state, the response would enable us to find out about the extent of the usefulness of the improvements and possibly the alternatives.
Grading contract
The first step of the project is a more detailed design of the new features plus evaluation of the alternatives and their relative merits. The proposed grade for achieving this milestone would be "C". The next step is to design and implement the equivalent of the TK Canvas widget, which would allow much better control of the MediaBoard display. This would enable among other things, scaling of items, displaying of banner windows etc. The proposed grade for this milestone would be B-. The next step would be to implement the features and make sure they work. The proposed grade at this stage would be A-. The goal would be to incrementally add new features during the semester so that they can be used during the class sessions, and be evaluation in some manner before the semester. The proposed grade for achieving that would be "A+".
References
S. Raman and T-L. Tung, "A Distributed MediaBoard Using the Scalable, Reliable Multicast Toolkit", UCB CS 262 Project Report, Dec. 1996.