The article outlined the early origins of groupware and\nspecifically described eight problem areas, suggests solutions to these\nproblems and examines groupware successes such as email. The eight problem\nareas examined were; the disparity between who does the work and who gets the\nbenefit, critical mass and prisoner’s dilemma problems, social, political and\nmotivational factor, exception handling in workgroups, designing for\ninfrequently used features, the underestimated difficulty of evaluating\ngroupware, the breakdown of intuitive decision-making and managing acceptance:\na new challenge for product developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is interesting to see that many of these problem areas are\nstill relevant in the context of today\u2019s world, even as groupware services have\nbecome ubiquitous. Thinking of the enterprise level, it is still true today\nthat the end user does not always have a say in the final design of a groupware\nproduct, this may lead to situations where people have to conform to a certain\nrequirement to make a system work. A good example is the virtual Kanban system\nmentioned in Matthiesen et al.\u2019s 2014 paper on collaborative work. The designers\nof the system did not account for who would end up using it in the context of\nteamwork. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, for a groupware system to be successful, it\nrequires a critical mass, this was most obvious in our class. Some students had\nto sign up and download slack for the slack channel for cscw to work\neffectively. Social and political motivational factors also seem an important\ncriterion in the design of modern groupware. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my opinion, the exception handling in workgroups, and\ndesigning for infrequently used features have been problems that modern\ndesigners have been actively working to solve. The use of various user research\nmethodologies as well as the success of groupware integration by google (docs,\nsheets, calendar, etc.) confirm this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As groupware grows with technology and innovation,\nevaluating them becomes harder, which is inline with the paper. This is especially\ntrue when evaluating crowdsourcing and citizen science-based software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The design and evaluation of groupware has been iteratively\nchanging since the time of publication of this article, though many of the problem\nareas still remain, while some seem to be addressed. With an ever-connected world,\nit would be interesting to integrate more factors (such as the effects of\nculture, demographics, etc.) that affect the design of groupware. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The article outlined the early origins of groupware and specifically described eight problem areas, suggests solutions to these problems and examines groupware successes such as email. The eight problem areas examined were; the disparity between who does the work and who gets the benefit, critical mass and prisoner’s dilemma problems, social, political and motivational factor,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":268,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/268"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}