Awareness support for asynchronous engineering collaboration

This study addresses collaboration awareness for asynchronous distributed engineering collaboration with computer-aided design (CAD) browsers. An analysis of the characteristics of asynchronous collaboration identified the information that needs to be presented. Two features for a CAD browser system, team member information enhancement and task information enhancement, were designed to improve collaborator and task awareness. An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the new proposed features. The results of the experiment indicated the following. First, the enhancement of team member information and task information improved collaboration efficiency by 8.1 and 20.2%, respectively. Second, for asynchronous collaboration, the availability and workload of team members need to be presented rather than capturing and presenting dynamic information about team members. Third, the information about the status of each task, such as the progress, time passed, and dependability, needs to be enhanced for efficient collaboration. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 13: 97–113, 2003.

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