Making the Invisible Visible: Design Guidelines for Supporting Social Awareness in Distributed Collaboration

Mechanisms supporting a shared representation of activities — or awareness—within a group of people are an important prerequisite for successful computer supported collaborative activities. This article highlights the design of awareness support from a social psychological viewpoint of human behaviour in and within groups. Based on this, design guidelines for awareness support in distributed collaboration—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.

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