Comments on Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:03:55 GMT

p.s. my methodology hinges on a slight refinement of your “Collaboration is action-oriented”. Point being this, playing on the distinguishing between “data” and information i.e. when I’m confronted with a decision point (existentially) salience makes itself felt. I mean at a gut level. This has everything to do with cognitive schema (“pop-out” and “priming”, yes?). Data that isn’t salient is, if not noise, distraction. (We daren’t throw it away … since events are actually fractal there’s no telling with certainty what will come into play.) Without denigrating other issues as trivial, the required action (i.e. decision point) imposes a set of priorities … and that should/must be empowered, that has to translate into a set of operational filters: these datum are salient, these are key, and all of those are secondary / peripheral.

Ben Tremblay — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:41:10 GMT

*kudos*
After a period of intense and productive activity on my collaborative decision-making systems I just took a moment to kick back and ponder. What came to mind was “I wonder what folk at B&A are up to.”

And I find this thread at the top of the homepage.
How fine is that?!

Andy Polaine — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:59:08 GMT

You should check out the Omnium software (disclaimer: I’ve been involved with the project for some time). It’s mainly used for online collaborative teaching projects, often worldwide, but has a pretty good set of features. For this particular use it would need some expanding, but it’s open source so if anyone with the skills out there wants to get stuck in, they would be welcome. I teach (design and interaction design) students with it to Australia from here in Germany and really like it. http://www.omnium.net.au/software

Demetrius Madrigal — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:43:16 GMT

Matthew: Good point on the leadership aspect, for this application I was thinking about the role of the project manager and how they can get overloaded quickly. Collaboration definitely requires coordination and transparency would be very useful in that regard. I have a lot of interest in this topic, I recently saw Kim Goodwin from Cooper describing their team model during a talk and it was very compelling, it might be interesting to see what she would look for in a piece of software. Understanding the work of your teammates is a major hurdle also, I recently proposed an article on this site intended to help people understand research (my specialty) in the interest of better collaboration.

Matthew C. Clarke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:33:46 GMT

Demetrius: Excellent point about “collaboration software address[ing] the behavioral piece”. That not only applies to training. It would be very useful for the collaboration platform to have some embedded understanding of team dynamics, such as Bruce Tuckman’s Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model.

Matthew C. Clarke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:29:22 GMT

Demetrius: there are some good things about Groove. I like how a workspace is both local and shared. That is, you can work on your copy of an artefact while disconnected from the network, and then it is auto-synced (auto-sunc?)when you reconnect. The product still suffers from the vendor lock-in that was noted by Destry about SharePoint.

Matthew C. Clarke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:26:17 GMT

Demetrius: On leadership, I deliberately left that out of the model because it plays such a different role in different teams. in fact some collaborative methodologies avoid any single leader, preferring to emphasise equal responsibility. Nevertheless, many (probably most) contexts would value the type of functionality that you suggest: namely, the ability for a designated person to see/control what others in the team are doing.

Destry Wion — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:23:18 GMT

Matthew: I see what you mean now, thanks. I thought you were referring to a physical melding of contributions (the resulting artifact), whereas you are talking more about the collaboration leading to the artifact’s final state. Seems trivial at first look, but there is a difference. My reference to color was misleading, as I was using it as an analogy of melding process and the illogical outcome if applied to text communication. :)

Matthew C. Clarke — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:33:13 GMT

Gabriel: thanks for the comments. I had not previously seen qtask and as I stated in the article, part of my intention was to find out about software I hadn’t considered. On first glance qtask looks quite neat. One question I have is about how open the architecture is—could different customers plug in alternative modules (e.g. could they incorporate Jira if that was what they were already using for task tracking?

—Matt.

Matthew C. Clarke — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:23:33 GMT

On Susan’s pointer to IBM: The idea of synchronised web browsing is novel, but with more general purpose tools for remote screen sharing (GoToMeeting, WebEx etc), why would you want just that limited facility?

I like Blue Spruce—“to allow several users to huddle over Web pages and interact in real time as participants mark up the page”. That’s what I referred to in the article as multi-user editing and would be wonderful to see. This may help Destry Wion understand what I was referring to. The idea is not necessarily to merge multiple people’s changes in separate colours, but for all participants to see a single object that they can all manipulate. Of course, there would be a need to indicate who is making what changes, and that may be reflected in colour coding, or by floating avatars or something else.

—Matt.

Stephanie L. Trunzo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:40:43 GMT

Although it is more focused on collaborative development, also check out IBM’s Jazz.net and Rational Team Concert.

Demetrius Madrigal — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:29:46 GMT

Interesting article, I liked reading your take on collaboration and it’s directions. I’d love to see your model expanded with your sports-team metaphor applied as a way of providing an example. Another piece of software that you might consider taking a look at is Microsoft’s Office Groove: (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/HA101656331033.a…). I haven’t used it, but I know that it’s goal is to provide a single shared collaborative workspace.

There are a couple things I’d like to see added to your description of ideal collaboration software. The first regards the role of the team leader. A leader has to be able to keep tabs on his or her team members and ensure progress, I think any good collaboration software should include this. My designed some communication software for search and rescue teams a few years back and teams really appreciated the ability for the team leader to be able to keep tabs on all his people from a single source.

The second focuses on training. In my personal experience some of the most collaborative teams include football teams, hostage negotiation teams, and military units from companies down to fire teams. One thing that all of these teams have in common is that they train together regularly. As a result, they really understand their team members, their habits and their capabilities very well. I would like to see some kind of training feature in a which the team can work together to accomplish some kind of mini-task on some kind of regular or semi-regular basis. I feel like the biggest hurdle to effective collaboration is behavioral, it can be hard to get people that are not accustomed to collaborating to do it regularly and well. I’d love to see collaboration software address the behavioral piece.

Destry Wion — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:24:18 GMT

One problem with SharePoint is the vendor lock-in and technical portfolio requirement. Forget it. You lose creative input right there from what would otherwise be a larger pool of of developers and UX people. Whatever happens it needs to be open. I agree with the module-based framework approach; seems like the right way to go.

Just read that article Susan Chopra linked to. Very interesting. The collaborative web browsing is, in my opinion, a perfect example of the missing collaboration capabilities implied here. Certainly one artifact to covet.

One thing I don’t quite get is your suggestion for synchronous collaboration (simultaneous merging?) on a document. For example, you pointed out diffing and subversion, etc, and seem to say that the most recent version save—trumping the previous—is less than perfect. Do you mean the process is too clunky (e.g., having to pick through a diffing page), or there should be a more esoteric merging of text, like mixing blue and yellow to get green?

Susan Chopra — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:24:10 GMT

Interesting article! Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on what they’re doing over at IBM: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10195178-60.html?tag=ne…

Blanc-Laine Gabriel — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:49:10 GMT

Terrific article. I buy in!
As to real Web2.0 PM & Collaboration tools are concern, I would agree that very few solutions have today either the breadth and depth we need, or the right integrated architecture. Lot of solutions are still addressing one issue (usually very well), but are far to be this comprehensive, secure SaaS based virtual office that should enable result oriented collaboration across the street or across the world.
The success factors are first a very advanced architecture (service hypercube allowing to seamlessly move from one service to the other and link everything with everything), second a high level of Transparency and finally a high degree of Accountability. One tool does that, really. It is not on your radar screen yet. You should take a look at www.Qtask.com.