Joint Attention and Co-Construction: New Ways to Foster User-Designer Collaboration

1. Joint Attention and Co-Construction:New Ways to Foster User-Designer Collaboration Arne Raeithel and Boris M. Velichkovsky presented by Alex Feinman

2. User-Centered Design • Freedom vs. Uncertainty of Course • “…the more you design for freely choosable, trustworthy possibilities for users, the less you will be able to foresee the possible breakdowns of expectations that users may experience…” • Need to balance focus of features with utility of a limited feature set. • Need methodology to ascertain where breakdowns are likely, and how to aid without adding new complications

3. The Need for Attention • Users need to pay attention to complete tasks • Interruptions cause errors due to lost or mistaken context • In collaborative tasks, mismatch of participants’ attention can cause contextual errors • Software should support joint attention • performed experiments with eye tracking to capture utility of transmitting locus of attention

4. Experiment 1 • Puzzle solving game • Novice moves puzzle pieces; Expert has access to puzzle solution • Three conditions explored: • 1. Participants communicate only by voice • 2. Expert can point to pieces with mouse • Roughly 40% improvement in performance • 3. Novice can see gaze position of expert • also 40% improvement in performance • Dialogs significantly different between 2 and 3

5. Experiment 1

6. Experiment 2

7. Experiment 2 • Same task as experiment 1 • Expert can see gaze position of Novice • “significant” improvement in performance • allows deixis (pointing) without using mouse • Possible uses of eye-tracking are limited by current technology, but can draw general conclusions about the utility of recording or transmitting user's locus of attention

8. Primer on activity theory • Views the task performed by a of community of users at three levels: • Activity - historical, socio-cultural, ongoing • Action - high level task-oriented steps • Operation - low-level steps to perform an action • No clear methodologies for each level

9. Co-Construction of Task Structure • Communities negotiate hierarchy and boundaries of tasks • Designers of software for communities need to understand and support the task hierarchy and construction of task boundaries • e.g, might collect forms used by office and write scenarios where users use these forms specifically to inform construction of computerized forms • (compare user work in GROUP methodology)

10. Repertory Grid Technique as method for rule-guided co-construction • Repertory grid is a mechanism for recording individual preferences for and views of certain items • Elicits stance on a number of distinctions, constructed by the informant, for each item • In this example, feelings on differing forms of communication (email, telephone, etc.) • (dates to Kelly 1955)

11. Repertory Grid (p. 221)

12. Common View (p. 223) – compare to p. 224

13. Common Grid (cont.) • New tool for “eliciting common views of a domain” • Allows visualization of community's consensus views, in this example on communication tasks; best for comparison between communities • Gives insight for developer into social impact various types of communication are likely to have on a community • e.g., in this community, faxes are very similar to offical letters, so perhaps could replace them

14. Conclusions • Need methodology to examine how users collaborate - presents methodologies for examining levels of activity theory: • Joint Attention studies - could be used to examine user's attention during testing • Common View - could be used to examine community's activity-level views on various forms of communication;or to cluster tasks • Study of email represents example of “cooperative modeling” methodology

15. Alex’s conclusions • The chapter asks a lot of leading questions, but doesn't provide many answers • Taken from a book on activity theory, the paper emphasizes ways to look at the users’ physical and social environment, rather than just the task, when designing software