IMPROMPTU: A New Interaction Framework for Supporting Collaboration in Multiple Display Environments and Its Field Evaluation for Co-located Software Development
Published in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2008
Recommended citation: Biehl, J.T., W.T. Baker, B.P. Bailey, D.S. Tan, K. Inkpen & Czerwinski, M. 2008. "IMPROMPTU: A New Interaction Framework for Supporting Collaboration in Multiple Display Environments and Its Field Evaluation for Co-located Software Development." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 939-948.
We present a new interaction framework for collaborating in multiple display environments (MDEs) and report results from a field study investigating its use in an authentic work setting. Our interaction framework, IMPROMPTU, allows users to share task information across displays via off-the-shelf applications, to jointly interact with information for focused problem solving and to place information on shared displays for discussion and reflection. Our framework also includes a lightweight interface for performing these and related actions. A three week field study of our framework was conducted in the domain of face-to-face group software development. Results show that teams utilized almost every feature of the framework in support of a wide range of development-related activities. The framework was used most to facilitate opportunistic collaboration involving task information. Teams reported wanting to continue using the framework as they found value in it overall.