Cooperative Work and Shared Visual Context: An Empirical Study of Comprehension Problems in Side-by-Side and Remote Help Dialogues

If the sharing of context is now widely acknowledged as a condition for successful communication, existing studies do not allow us to determine whether it is necessary to restore the maximum of shared visual information to obtain the best communicative performance. To address this issue, three help dialogue conditions distinguished by the range of shared visual information are compared. The analyses are focused on the comprehension problems raised by each condition. The results highlight that comprehension efficiency in help dialogues is not necessarily linked to the quantity of shared visual information. This study suggests two reasons for this observation: (a) Help requesters in remote help dialogues adapt the content of their requests to the effective amount of shared visual information, and (b) helpers adapt their interpretive strategies to the available shared resources. On the other hand, it is shown that the inability to visually share some specific task-related information strongly affects communication efficiency. Implications for the design of computer-mediated communication systems are drawn from these results.

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