Announcing Activity: Design and Evaluation of an Intentionally Enriched Awareness Service

ABSTRACT We introduce and explore the notion of “intentionally enriched awareness.” Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We explore this concept designing and evaluating the AnyBiff system, which allows users to freely create, share, and use a variety of biff applications. Biffs are simple representation of predefined activities. Users can select biffs to indicate that they are engaged in an activity. AnyBiff was deployed in two different organizations as part of a user-centered design process. We report on the results of the trial, which allowed us to gain insights into the potential of the AnyBiff prototype and the underlying biff concept to implement intentionally enriched awareness. Our findings show that intentional disclosure mechanisms in the form of biffs were successfully used in both fields of application. Users actively engaged in the design of a large variety of biffs and explored many different uses of the concept. The study revealed a whole host of issues with regard to intentionally enriched awareness, which give valuable insight into the conception and design of future applications in this area.

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