DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS

OF COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

Monique Janneck

Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 11, 20146 Hamburg, Germany

Keywords: Awareness, Computer-supported cooperative work, Computer-supported cooperative learning, Social

psychology.

Abstract: Mechanisms supporting a shared representation of activities—or awareness—within a group of people are

an important prerequisite for successful computer supported cooperative activities. This article highlights

the design of awareness mechanisms from a social psychological viewpoint of human behaviour in and

within groups. Based on this, design guidelines for awareness functions supporting cooperative activities—

with an emphasis on promoting social awareness—are proposed and evaluated empirically. Results show

that users’ awareness was influenced positively as predicted by the design guidelines.

1 INTRODUCTION

For cooperative activities to take place, the people

involved need to develop a shared understanding of

the context that they are cooperating in and the tasks

that they are working on. In face-to-face interaction

this is an implicit process, which is commonly

supported by nonverbal communication. Tools

supporting cooperative activities need to provide for

mechanisms enabling this kind of awareness in

computer-supported interaction as well: “Awareness

is an understanding of the activities of others, which

provides a context for your own activities” (Dourish

& Bellotti, 1992).

Cooperative activities are necessarily social

activities. Research focusing on computer supported

cooperative learning (CSCL) or work (CSCW)

generally stresses the meaning of social processes

influencing the shared representations and

generation of knowledge, drawing especially on

social constructivist theories, e.g. Koschmann

(1996). However, long-known, ‘classical’ social

psychological findings and theories providing a

plethora of insights into interaction within and

between groups have been barely drawn upon to

inform the design of cooperative systems (Janneck,

2007).

To start filling this gap, this article highlights the

design of awareness mechanisms from a social

psychological viewpoint and develops design

guidelines for awareness functions supporting

cooperative activities, with an emphasis on

promoting social awareness.

To put these design guidelines to a first

empirical test, several simple awareness functions

were added to an existing groupware system and

evaluated by means of an experimental design

comparing both subjective and objective awareness

measures in a field test before and after the new

awareness functionalities had been implemented.

Results show that users’ awareness was influenced

positively as predicted by the design guidelines.

This article is structured as follows: Section 2

discusses social issues in cooperative activities,

drawing on ‘classical’ social psychological research

on group structures, relations, and dynamics as basis

for the design of awareness mechanisms. Section 3

describes related work regarding the representation

of social activities in computer-supported

interaction. Section 4 introduces design guidelines

for implementing social awareness support based on

the concepts discussed in section 2. In section 5, an

empirical implementation and evaluation of these

design guidelines is described. Section 6 concludes

this article with a discussion of the results and an

outline for future work.

463

Janneck M.

DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS OF COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES.

DOI: 10.5220/0001754204630470

In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2009), page

ISBN: 978-989-8111-81-4

2 SOCIAL ISSUES

IN COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

In the following paragraphs, two aspects influencing

group work are presented exemplarily. In section 4,

they will be related to the design for social

awareness in computer-supported cooperative

learning and working groups.

2.1 Group Structures and Relations

It is a long-known fact that structures and relations

within groups heavily influence the group’s success

concerning cooperative activities (e.g. Blake &

Mouton, 1964; Herzberg et al., 1959).

Centralized structures of communication,

dominated by single individuals, threaten to

discourage other group members, thus lowering

group productivity. On the other hand, structures

enabling equal contributions and self-dependent

work of all members yield better results (Leavitt,

1951).

Of course, favourable group structures and

relations, which are conducive to productive

cooperation, cannot be established or even enforced

through software support. However, software design

can facilitate or impede on cooperation. Awareness

mechanisms can serve to make group structures

transparent.

2.2 Social Loafing

Group members who benefit from other members’

efforts while contributing little themselves are

known as social loafers (e.g. Latane et al., 1979). In

computer-mediated communication, social loafing is

often referred to as lurking, addressing the problem

of the passiveness of—usually—the vast majority of

users, while only a small number of participants

contribute actively (e.g. Nonnecke & Preece, 2000).

However, Takahashi et al. (2003) report that

many of the alleged lurkers nevertheless made a

substantial contribution to offline communication in

their company by using and actively spreading

information they obtained from the intranet.

Exchanging and gathering information online are

typical activities in computer-supported cooperation.

Quite naturally, though, downloading data from e.g.

a shared workspace will leave less traces of activity

than lively online discussions. Making this kind of

‘passivity’—which might result in activity

elsewhere—more visible can be supported by

awareness mechanisms.

Social loafing occurs most often when people get

the impression that their contribution is

unidentifiable or redundant regarding the overall

result, so that their lack of contribution will go

unnoticed or remain without consequences. Social

loafing is reduced when group members take on

responsibility for the group result, and when their

individual contributions are clear. Awareness

mechanisms serve to make individual activities

visible.

3 REPRESENTING SOCIAL

ACTIVITY

Typical awareness mechanisms include notifications

of events or changes and tracking mechanisms of

people’s presence (“who is online?”) and actions

within the shared workspace.

Many cooperative systems support mainly

awareness of tasks that are worked on within the

group (e.g., notification of changes that were made

to a document).

The representation of social activities—or social

awareness—that are often manifested in cursory

interactions, leaving no visible or tangible trace

(comparable to ‘coffee breaks’ in face-to-face

interactions), is more of a challenge to systems

design, meaning to make ‘invisible’ actions (e.g.,

browsing the workspace and reading entries) more

visible. In the following paragraphs some

approaches and examples of representing social

activity are portrayed.

The social navigation approach aims at enabling

users to find relevant information by interpreting

traces that other users left behind (Dieberger et al.,

2000), thus conveying the history of digital objects

(Wexelblat, 1998). However, so far use scenarios for

social navigation have been mainly explored in the

context of individual navigation through web

resources (e.g. customer recommendations—

“customers who bought this book also bought…”—

or feedback comments on platforms such as

ebay.com or amazon.com) and less in the area of

cooperative activity.

Erickson & Kellog (2000) call systems that make

socially meaningful clues visible socially

translucent. So-called social proxies intend to give

an abstract, minimalist representation of real-world

activities (Erickson et al., 2002). For example, the

communication platform Babble (Erickson et al.,

2002) portrays chat partners as coloured dots within

a circle, moving to the centre when they converse

WEBIST 2009 - 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

464

actively and back to the border when inactive. The

audio conferencing system Talking in Circles

(Rodenstein & Donath, 2000) uses graphical

representations of users to show who is participating

in conversations: Participants, represented as

coloured circles, need to be within ‘hearing distance’

of a speaker to be able to receive the audio

transmission. This way, parallel conversations are

possible while making visible who is talking and

who is participating in the conversation.

Perry & Donath (2004) use anthropomorphic

representations to display users’ activity in e.g.

discussion forums over a longer period of time.

These ‘stick-figures’ look bigger and brighter when

the users they represent participate actively, and fade

as activity ceases. The number of postings is

depicted as small boxes in the figures’ ‘bellies’, and

their facial expressions give some insight into the

emotional tone of the users’ contributions,

interpreting emotional keywords in the texts.

However, Perry & Donath (2004) admit that users

might feel their representations to be wrong,

misleading, or even caricatured, resulting in efforts

to manipulate their ‘stick-figure’ by writing

compensatory yet senseless postings.

PeopleGarden (Donath, 2002) depicts message

board members as flowers, growing and flourishing

according to their activity. A message board whose

members show low activity will look like a

neglected garden with only few and dispersed plants.

An active group will be represented as a prosperous

garden with a variety of blooming flowers.

Social proxies like PeopleGarden (Donath, 2002)

or anthropomorphic representations (Perry &

Donath, 2004) deliberately use emotionally

appealing and evocative visualizations of social

activities, in contrast to more neutral representations

(e.g. Erickson et al., 2002 or Rodenstein & Donath,

2000). However, Donath (2002) argues that

completely neutral visualizations are never possible

anyway, because social activities always evoke

judgments on the side of the people involved.

Therefore design decisions should explicitly involve

knowledge of social processes.

4 GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING

FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS OF

COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

The social psychological concepts presented in

section 2 can be used to evaluate existing

approaches of visualizing social activities (section 3)

and develop new ideas for designing awareness

mechanisms in cooperative systems. In the following

paragraphs, this is done in the form of proposals,

drawing on the issues of group structures and

relations and social loafing.

4.1 Group Structures and Relations

1. Enable control: Visualizing social activities

within a shared workspace is vital for conveying a

sense of social structures and relations. However,

people need to retain some control over which of

their activities are made visible for other members—

and how this is done—to keep their autonomy in

use. Making transparent for users how their actions

are being visualized helps them to avoid that

information they want to keep private is made

public.

2. No customization: For the reason of transparency,

awareness functions should not be customizable.

3. No automatic interpretations: Social activities and

emotions should be recognizable, but not be

interpreted by the software, for this affects users’

control and self-management in a very sensible area.

This is an argument against deducing emotional

states from e.g. the text of postings (like this is done

by Perry & Donath, 2004) or even forecasting future

user behaviour (cf. Hoffmann & Herrmann, n.d.). In

automatically interpreting emotional states, a system

suggests emotional competencies and meta-

knowledge concerning the social structure of a

group, which cannot be sensibly assumed. Erickson

(2003) states concisely: “Portray actions, not

interpretation”.

4. Do not judge actions: For the same reason,

judgmental visualizations should be seen critically

despite the liveliness they undoubtedly convey.

Emotionally appealing visualizations like a

withering garden or a wimpy and pale stick-figure

bear the danger of having a discouraging or

offending effect on users and hindering rather than

promoting further use in the sense of a self-fulfilling

prophecy (Merton, 1982). Furthermore, it is

problematic that the respective context cannot be

taken into account: Groups may differ regarding the

number and frequency of postings because they have

different conventions and motives for use, but still

feel a similar quality of interaction. This is also true

regarding individual users: An apparently less active

user might simply use more effective strategies

when navigating or searching for information (cf.

Pape et al., 2005).

DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS OF COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

465

4.2 Social Loafing

5. Make the invisible visible: Making ‘passive’ user

behaviour—like read access—more visible is

important to reflect its significance for cooperation.

This is a challenge especially for asynchronous

tools, because visualizations of users’ current

presence within the workspace—conveying a simple

and fast impression of other users’ presence—are

not useful here. Detailed, personalized navigational

and activity histories tend to take up much time,

screen space, and attention, especially in larger

groups. Furthermore, detailed activity accounts

conflict with privacy and control issues. Instead, to

enable users to grasp activities quickly and

intuitively,

6. aggregate sensible and read access information:

Instead of giving detailed and personalized records

of activity, it is recommendable to visualize

potentially sensible and read access information in

an aggregated form (e.g., “10 of 35 people logged on

last week” or “3 of 6 people have accessed this

posting”). Abstract or visual representations help to

grasp the information without much cognitive load

(compared to text-based information). However, the

visualization should be non-judgmental and neutral.

7. No anonymous action: in contrast to passive

participation, active contributions—i.e., write

access—should be clearly traceable and attributable

to the respective authors to encourage personal

responsibility and avoid social loafing. This implies

that anonymous interaction is not recommendable in

cooperative activities.

8. Be careful with notifications: Considering the

danger of social loafing and taking into account that

‘passive’ behaviour like reading other postings,

downloading files, or simply browsing the shared

workspace for information are significant activities

that should be visible for the group, notifications

have to be seen critically. There is a danger that

users develop a reactive rather than an active mode

of usage: If usage is mainly triggered by the system,

users will visit the workspace not because of

personal motivation, but because they expect an

‘incentive’ (i.e., new information). Furthermore, this

devaluates passive forms of participation, which will

not cause any notification. It also brings about a

selective perception of group activities, particularly

as notifications usually need to be customizable to

prevent information overload. This has to be

weighed against the convenience of being informed

of new postings in a quick and timesaving way.

5 DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF

AN ENHANCED AWARENESS

SUPPORT

The design guidelines presented in the last section

were put to the test by designing and implementing

additional awareness functionalities for an existing

groupware system that showed a lack of support of

social awareness in empirical evaluations (Janneck,

2007). The new awareness functions were evaluated

by means of an experimental design comparing both

subjective and objective awareness measures in a

field test before and after the new awareness

functionalities had been implemented. In the

following sections, the software, the new awareness

features, and evaluation results are presented.

5.1 CommSy

The software that was used as a basis is CommSy, a

web-based system to support group work, which is

used mainly at universities, schools, but also at the

workplace. A detailed description is given e.g. by

Pape et al. (2002). People work together in shared

workspaces, so-called project workspaces, providing

upload and cooperative editing possibilities, a shared

calendar, discussion forums, to-do lists, a billboard

etc.

CommSy’s design principles emphasize the

social aspects of groupware use, such as negotiation

of usage rules and group responsibilities. These

principles are reflected in design features such as

shared editing rights pertaining to almost all entries

in the system, no customization, and equal access

rights.

Furthermore, the CommSy designers object to

autonomous and interpretative system functions. For

that reason they were also sceptical of awareness

functions, which they viewed as system

interpretations of user actions.

However, empirical investigations with a large

user basis (over 1500 people using the system on a

regular basis were surveyed over several years,

Janneck, 2007) showed that the users suffered from

a lack of social awareness: Users did not leave any

traces within the system unless they actively decided

to do so. ‘Passive’ participation like downloading

information or reading each other’s contributions

was just not visible in the system, even though this

was the main use pattern in most use contexts of use.

As a consequence, especially the more active users

experienced frustration because they felt that their

contributions were not being perceived at all.

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Therefore it was decided in conjunction with this

study to add minor awareness functions that were in

accordance with the main CommSy design

principles.

5.2 Designing Awareness Functions

The CommSy design already addresses some of the

guidelines presented in section 4, such as avoiding

customization and notifications and also permitting

no anonymous entries. The design requirements for

the awareness functionalities can be summarized as

follows, answering the three central questions posed

by Gutwin & Greenberg (1999):

1. What information should be gathered and

displayed to the group?

It is necessary to visualize how contributions are

received within a group of users working together.

This especially applies to read access information,

since written contributions are imminently visible.

2. How should this information be presented?

To enable transparency and shared group awareness

in accordance with the CommSy design principles,

awareness information must be equally accessible

for all group members. To avoid control over

individual participation, there should be no

personalized access information. Judgemental

visualizations should be avoided, preferring abstract

illustrations.

3. When, and for what activities, are the different

kinds of information important?

Since CommSy was developed to support mainly

asynchronous cooperation, awareness functions

should display past rather than current actions. The

group’s interaction rhythm (i.e., how often are

members expected to use the system) or important

milestones of cooperation (e.g. changes on a

document) might serve as reference points.

Based on these requirements, two visualizations

of read access information were designed: An

activity display on the workspace home page and

detailed access information for every item in the

project room.

Activity Display on the Home Page. The workspace

home page already provides an overview of the

latest group activities. It can be configured to display

all items that were posted or changed within an

adjustable time span (e.g. during the last 7 days).

Therefore, a glance on the home page is sufficient to

gather the latest information from the group instead

of having to browse the whole workspace.

In addition, awareness functions conveying an

impression of social presence and general level of

activity were integrated into the home page. The

following information was used (Figure 1):

- The number of group members who have

logged on within the time span set for the home

page to show how many people currently

participate in the group work,

- the read access level (i.e., the number of page

impressions) within this time span to give an

impression of the activity level within the

project room which can also be compared over

time,

- and, contrasting, the write access level (i.e., the

number of posts) to show that the (possibly)

frustratingly low level of active posting is

accompanied by a much higher level of

“passive” participation, which is equally vital

for cooperation but often remains invisible.

Figure 1: Activity Display on Project Room Home Page.

Detailed Access Information. As evaluation results

showed, CommSy users—especially active users—

feel uncertain regarding the questions of if and how

their postings will be received by other group

members and if changes they make will be

recognized in time. To address this uncertainty

detailed access information was added for each

posting, showing the overall number of group

members that have viewed this particular entry and

also the number of people who visited this page after

it has been edited. It is visualized by a bar showing

the percentage of project room members who called

on this item (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Detailed access information for one posting.

A personalized read access history (as it is

provided by many groupware systems) was avoided

in accordance with the design guidelines presented

in section 4 to prevent misuse as control instrument.

DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS OF COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

467

5.3 Evaluation

The awareness mechanisms described above were

evaluated by means of a user questionnaire,

measuring social awareness. Results were compared

with data gathered before the awareness mechanisms

had been implemented to test for an increase of

social awareness.

560 users filled out the pre-awareness

questionnaire, 460 answered the post-awareness

survey. Respondents used CommSy mainly in

Higher Education contexts. They reflected on use

periods of 3-6 months (typically one semester).

Project workspaces were made up of groups with an

average of 25 members.

5.3.1 Subjective Assessment of Usefulness

Respondents were asked to rate the usefulness of the

new awareness information on four-category Likert

scales, with positive results: Approximately 60%,

respectively, agreed that the activity display on the

home page and also the detailed access information

had proven useful.

This was especially true for participants

regarding themselves as more active than average,

with approximately 70% positive evaluations in this

user group.

To investigate differences between more active

and more passive users, Mann-Whitney-U-tests were

calculated for intergroup comparisons. Both users

posting a more-than-average amount of entries or

considering themselves as more active than average

rated the awareness mechanisms significantly better

than users who behaved more passively (p<0.05).

This is also true for teachers (or moderators of

project workspaces, respectively) compared to

students/participants

(p=0.000).

These results reflect the uncertainty of especially

active users regarding the reception of their postings,

which was already mentioned above. The especially

positive evaluation of the awareness mechanisms in

this user group provides evidence that the awareness

functions alleviate these difficulties and thus

encourage active use.

5.3.2 Comparison

of Pre- and Post-Awareness Measures

Apart from subjective evaluations it was measured if

and to what extent the awareness mechanisms had a

positive impact on the perception of social

awareness and the level of cooperation. For that

purpose pre-awareness and post-awareness survey

results were compared.

Both questionnaires asked users to rate their

level of agreement to the following statements:

I have a good overview of group activities within

the project workspace.

The majority of workspace members participate

regularly.

The underlying hypotheses were that both

overview of group activities (H1) and perception of

participation (H2) would be increased after the

awareness mechanisms were introduced because

“passive” participation would become more visible.

There were no differences in actual participation

levels in the pre- and post-awareness condition.

Concerning workspace overview (H1) the

hypothesis was instantly confirmed: Users in the

post-awareness condition rated their perception of

group activities significantly better than users in the

pre-awareness condition (p=0.000). Active and

passive users do not show any differences in their

ratings.

Judgements of participation (H2) are more

hesitant at first sight: Pre- and post-awareness

comparison misses significance by a narrow margin

(p=0.058). However, looking at the more active

users only, participation is rated significantly higher

in the post-awareness condition (p=0.008). Again,

this is evidence for the importance of visualizing

read access, or “passive” participation: The

affirmation that other members perceived their

postings has a positive effect on the active members.

This positive effect was also measured within a

second, much larger group of users: Those

respondents giving an overall positive evaluation of

CommSy as support for group work (85% of

respondents) also rated participation significantly

higher in the post-awareness condition (p=0.008).

This is not surprising: Users evaluating CommSy as

inadequate generally give lower ratings of the

software design and functionality (Janneck 2007).

However, results of past surveys show that bad

evaluations are mostly due to an insufficient match

of software and use context or insufficient

introduction and support.

The pre- and post-awareness samples do not

differ regarding neither individual characteristics

(age, sex, use context, activity and participation,

frequency of use, experience regarding CommSy use

etc.) nor characteristics of system use or general

evaluation of CommSy functions. Respective results

have been stable across several years (Janneck,

2007).

Since apart from implementing the awareness

mechanisms described above there were no changes

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of the CommSy interface or functionality, it is

feasible to assume that the increase in social

awareness is actually due to the awareness functions.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

When people work together, the social dynamics

within the group necessarily impact on the outcome

and success of cooperative activities. For decades,

social psychology has studied interaction within and

between groups. This paper showed exemplarily

how these findings can be drawn upon to inform the

design of cooperative systems, focusing on

supporting social awareness in cooperative

activities. An empirical study was conducted to

investigate the effects that newly implemented

awareness functions—designed according to the

guidelines presented here—had on social awareness

within groups using the groupware system CommSy.

To sum up results, the new awareness

mechanisms were evaluated positively by the users

and also led to significantly improved social

awareness as compared to the pre-awareness

condition: Users feel better informed about group

activities, and the vast majority also perceive the

general activity level to be higher after the

awareness mechanisms were introduced, even

though there were no changes in actual participation

rates.

This is substantial evidence that “passive”

participation, i.e. read access, is crucial for

cooperative activities and should be made visible by

the software, as outlined in the awareness guidelines

in section 4. Especially active users with many posts

benefit from the feedback they receive through such

mechanisms.

Awareness functions naturally cannot increase

individual participation or create incentives for use

not otherwise provided. However, this study shows

that meaningful awareness mechanisms—sensefully

balancing collective information needs and

individual concerns of privacy and control—

influence the perception of cooperation positively,

since they reveal group members’ commitment,

efforts and activities that are often invisible in

cooperation.

It is especially remarkable that even adding such

sparse awareness features as it was done with

CommSy in this study yielded such clear effects:

Not only did the new awareness features lead to an

improvement of social awareness—in another study

comparing CommSy and the CSCW system BSCW

(http://public.bscw.de/en/index.html, e.g. Klöckner,

2002), CommSy received significantly better ratings

of awareness support even though BSCW provides

much more awareness functions (Wolfhagen, 2006).

Especially the very detailed, personalized read-

access information provided by BSCW (showing for

each post when it was accessed by what users) raised

fears regarding misuse and control and was rejected

by the users. Equally, BSCW’s extensive automatic

notification functions—informing users e.g. when

items are posted or changed—did not result in

improved awareness compared to CommSy: In spite

of notifications, BSCW users felt significantly more

often that they unnecessarily called on the shared

workspace.

Independent from the results of this study,

Wolfhagen (2006) concludes that the “sparse and

specific” use of awareness mechanisms in CommSy

is more adequate than BSCW’s extensive awareness

repertoire which might lead to counterproductive

“awareness overkill”.

Thus, the awareness guidelines presented here—

alerting designers to refrain from massive,

personalized awareness information and also

cautioning against the use of notification

mechanisms—could be substantiated in an

independent study.

Moreover, another analysis (Janneck, 2007)

showed that analyzing CommSy by means of the

design guidelines with regard to awareness support

lead to similar results concerning the software’s

strengths and weaknesses as empirical

investigations—another evidence for guideline’s

suitability for analysis and design.

Of course, further empirical tests are needed

exploring the consequences of different design

decisions with different groupware systems. There

are three possible strategies:

1) Analyzing existing software by means of the

guidelines and comparing the results with

empirical data, as this was done for CommSy

(Janneck 2007),

2) comparing use patterns of systems that took

different design approaches regarding awareness

support (as it was done by Wolfhagen (2006) for

CommSy and BSCW), and

3) evaluating prototypical implementations of

awareness mechanisms explicitly following the

guidelines and their effects on group interaction,

as it was done for CommSy in this study.

However, especially with software that is used in

real-life contexts by real users and not under test or

DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL AWARENESS OF COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES

469

laboratory conditions, it will always be difficult to

“prove” that certain effects that could be measured

were caused by specific singular design decisions:

The factors influencing quality, success, and

perception of software use are manifold and

complex, especially in cooperative settings.

Therefore, a triangulation approach as it was

sketched above seems the most promising in this

regard.

The theoretical basis drawn upon in this study

focused on the two areas of group structures and

relations and social loafing. In addition, other social

psychological concepts need to be explored. The

theory of Social Identity explaining intergroup

relations and their effects on group identification,

adherence, and motivation seems especially

promising in this respect (Rohde et al., 2004).

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