Coping with Complexity and Interference: Design Issues in Multimedia Conferencing Systems

Abstract

Once the concept of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) tools was established, many software developers responded enthusiastically, and quite a number of groupware applications were built and released in the space of a few years. Few of these applications, however, were taken up with the same enthusiasm by their intended users. Grudin (1990) studied several of the failed projects and detected a high level of resistance among users against adopting these applications. He attributed this resistance to inadequacies in the design of groupware applications, resulting from the developers’ failure to appreciate that technology which aims to support collaborative work groups has to address issues and concerns that are fundamentally different from those encountered in the development of other application software. In Grudin’s view, approaches developed in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Factors (HF) were ill equipped to tackle these problems, since they were based on experiences and observations of individual users interacting with stand-alone systems. Consequently, they focused on optimizing screen designs and interaction styles. Developing effective and successful groupware applications, however, required approaches that provided an in-depth understanding of the collaborative activities that these applications were trying to support.