Designing Group Annotations and Process Visualizations for RoleBased Collaboration

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Designing Group Annotations and Process
Visualizations for Role-Based Collaboration

• Gregorio Convertino, Anna Wu,
• Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang, Craig H. Ganoe,
• Blaine Hoffman and John M. Carroll
• The Pennsylvania State University

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Background

• Role-based collaboration
• E.g., emergency management
• Common ground (CG)
• Mutual knowledge, beliefs, and protocols
• A precondition for efficient teamwork
• E.g., a blind pass

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Previous Research
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Face-to-Face Computer-Supported Collaboration
(CSCW)
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Paper Study Face-to-Face Setting
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CSCWSetting
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Research Focuses

• Does common ground increase?
• Does it increase as people collaborate?
• What are the effects of the media (FtF vs. CSCW)?
• How does it increase?
• What are the underlying patterns and contents of
  communication?
• What are the implications for theory and design?
• What explanations can we offer about CG building?
• What tools can be used to increase the support
  for CG?

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Experimental Studies

• Emergency management planning on maps
• Find the best shelter among four to rescue a
  family from a flooded area
• Also consider two alternative shelters.
• Three roles
• Public works, Environmental, and Mass Care
  experts
• Task materials
• Member
• Role-specific map
• Role description
• List of 15 cons about shelters (8 unshared and
  7 shared risks)
• Each expert is biased toward a particular
  non-optimal solution.
• Team
• Large map
• Background information on the problem

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Findings

• Common ground increases through collaboration.
• Process measures
• Perceived common ground and awareness increase.
• Communication efficiency increases.
• Recall of alternative plans increases.
• Outcome measures
• Performance and satisfaction increase
• Completion time shortened.
• Plan optimality increases.
• Computer tools improve performances.
• CSCW groups faster than paper groups
• Higher initial plan optimality in CSCW groups
  than paper groups

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New Questions

• How to help users better process and utilize
  large and dynamic information corpora in
  decision-making under uncertainty?
• Limited cognitive resources
• Cannot remember all relevant information
• Slow in sorting relevant information
• Bias in decision-making
• Stick to more familiar solutions
• Stick to solutions proposed earlier
• Our approach to address these issues
• Externalizing critical information to improve the
  outcomes and processes of decision-making.

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Design Requirements

• Reducing cognitive load with information
  visualization
• Categorizing and aggregating massive data
• Grouping complex, dense datasets in ways that can
  be easily perceived
• Reducing decision bias with information
  visualization
• Supporting information review and comparison
• Providing spatial and temporal context

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Design

• Annotation construction
• Information sharing
• Annotation aggregation

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Design (Cont.)

• Annotation classification and aggregation
• Annotation temporal context visualization

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System Screenshots
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System Implementation

• Java-based system
• Collaboration support
• Our in-house BRIDGE toolkits to support group
  work
• Basic Resources for Integrated Distributed Group
  Environments.
• Geo-information visualization support
• GeoTools
• Open source GIS tools
• General visualization support
• Java Swing

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Software Architecture
Telepointer role indication
Process Visualization
Annotate
Transfer
Dual-pointer
Annotation Visualization
Tools
Dual-view and Tool Manager

View
Shared data Features and styles
Shared awareness data Zoom factor, viewports,
role codes, selection
Data
CORK duplicates shared objects and propagates
changes among multiple role-specific clients
GeoTools geospatial data architecture
Server
J2EE
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Pilot Study

• Stimuli
• Bar chart overview of cons (risks) by shelter
• Timeline overview of actions by role and time
• Research Questions
• The bar chart visualization will help the group
  to reduce judgment bias toward one shelter
• The timeline visualization will encourage team
  members to contribute more.

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Pilot Study

• 3-member team
• 2 confederates 1 participant
• Planning Task
• Choose the best shelter and rank the others
• Manipulation
• Induce early judgment bias
• Contents and order of annotations manipulated by
  the confederates.
• Confederates actions are scripted.

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Study Design
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Preliminary Observations

• More profound discussions on decisions.
• Individual annotations vs. Comparing and
  reviewing relevant annotations
• Simple count vs. Criticality of annotations
• Task completion time
• Faster to find shelters with the least cons
• Facilitating information processing with sorted,
  color-coded, and contextualized information
• Decision bias
• Participants indicated visualization helped on
  evaluating different choices.
• Despite confederates efforts to mislead the
  result.

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Next Step

• Conduct formal experiments to study the
  effectiveness and efficiency of these two
  visualization tools in decision-making
• Tweaking tasks
• Giving annotations different weights
• Improving visualization tools
• Visualization tools to support more complex
  processes
• Situational awareness
• Dynamic
• Multi-scale and multi-facet information
  clustering and aggregation
• Support analysis across different scale level.
• Support information classification and
  aggregation from different aspects.

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More Information

• Common ground project
• http//cscl.ist.psu.edu