Usability Trialling for CSCW Technology: Lessons from a Structured Messaging Task

Abstract

The shape of public communications networks is changing. Information technology integrated with communications services will provide opportunities for new forms of distributed work groups to develop. It will be possible to distribute work roles geographically for an activity and link them together through communications and computing facilities. The work itself need not take place by the participants working in a real-time conferencing mode. Group activities that involve passing various types of text-based document are a common feature of office life in any organization. This type of asynchronous group activity can be supported at relatively low transmission rates using conventional electronic mail (email) systems if simple text documents are used. This paper draws on the work being carried out at British Telecom’s (BT) laboratories on usability engineering trials of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems. It focuses primarily on the results obtained from a small trial of COSMOS II, a structured messaging system. The COSMOS II project follows on from the COSMOS collaborative project (see also Rodden, Chapter 1 and Gilbert, Chapter 4) which was carried out as part of the Alvey programme. The aim of this small trial was to identify issues that would need to be addressed if a full-scale trial of this type of CSCW system went ahead. The results of the COSMOS II trial, and the lessons learned from it, are presented here.