Grudin, Jonathan. “Groupware and social dynamics: Eight challenges for developers.” Readings in Human–Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. 762-774.
Summary:
This paper details an in depth understanding of groupware and social dynamics for organizational and individual perspectives that often portrayed individual experiences rarely being problematic where groupware experiences are often problematic. Through these perspectives, eight challenges arise for developers when developing groupware software. These eight challenges are: disparity in work and benefit, critical mass and prisoner’s dilemma problems, disruption of social processes, exception handling, unobtrusive accessibility, difficulty of evaluation, failure of intuition and breakdown of decision making, and the adoption process. A few shining examples of successful groupware is email, databases, and code management systems.
Reflection:
For a paper written in 1995, it shows maturity and insight when trying to develop groupware software and understand the social dynamics between management/decision makers and non-managerial users. Additionally, this idea of the in between of individual and organizational, groups, is interesting. It gives grounding for this idea that groups are a collection of individuals but not so big that it’s an organization. Grudin says it best by saying “an organization is a collection of groups.” Of course, this leads to the challenge presented in this paper: how do you develop groupware that focuses on this niche setting of groups? The summary portion briefly lists the eight challenges that Grudin deeply considers.
Last week’s paper on social translucence, written in 2000 (5 years after this paper), focused on three lens of visibility, awareness, and accountability. What’s interesting is this idea of groups was implicitly understood simply because grounding in communication needs at least 2+ people. In fact, I think the most relevant challenges listed by Grudin to Erickson et al. social translucence are critical mass and prisoner’s dilemma problems, disruption of social processes, and failure of intuition and breakdown of decision making. The critical mass problem was alleviated by Erickson et al. when the software they used, Babble, had a relevant group size that found use in communicating with each other. The disruption of social processes was also alleviated by focusing on the social translucence lens where users can infer presence and awareness of a fellow user. Additionally, the design of Babble allowed for social interaction through abstract text and graphic representation. Lastly, failure of intuition for developing groupware/multiuser applications, especially when intuition comes from individual software application experience, undoubtedly hurts the final multiuser product. Erickson et al. made it a point to consider from the start that Babble is to facilitate social interaction and thus needs to be built with multiple users in mind and showing good intuition for developing groupware.
To conclude, this blog post considered Grudins eight challenges to developing groupware and reflected on how Erickson et al. tackle some of these challenges indirectly. We glean from these readings that groups are inherently important to understanding a balance of groupware that isn’t completely individualistic nor completely organizationally sized. More importantly, the challenges and grounding in communication arguably go hand in hand to craft a fruitful social interaction and user experience.