ABSTRACT
Personal cloud services such as Dropbox are used increasingly to support collaborative work, even though they typically have poor support for tracking files and users' activities and collaborators often rely on other communication channels to be notified of changes. We present a meta-cloud storage service, MUBox, that, independent of a particular cloud storage service, provides improved support for collaboration. First, users can switch to activity views that list user activities rather than files, which is an example of an increasingly available feature in popular cloud storage clients. Second, MUBox introduces multi-user aware folder views that embed information on the last changes performed by collaborators. These folder views are enhanced based on a new concept of shadow files which act as placeholders for files that have been moved or renamed. A user study (N=16) with realistic folder exploration tasks shows that activity views have a significant effect on the accuracy and confidence of users in workspace awareness tasks, while shadow files significantly improve the speed, accuracy and confidence of users in traceability tasks. We describe how existing services could implement these features as well as a new concept for voting on changes to shared folders that could improve asynchronous collaboration.
- Bergman, O., Tucker, S., Beyth-Marom, R., Cutrell, E., and Whittaker, S. It's not that important: demoting personal information of low subjective importance using GrayArea. In Proc. CHI (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Biehl, J., Czerwinski, M., Smith, G., and Robertson, G. FASTDash: A visual dashboard for fostering awareness in software teams. In Proc. CHI (2007). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Calefato, F., Gendarmi, D., and Lanubile, F. Adding social awareness to Jazz for reducing socio-cultural distance between distributed teams, 2009. Eclipse-IT.Google Scholar
- DeLine, R., Czerwinski, M., and Robertson, G. Easing Program Comprehension by Sharing Navigation Data. In Proc. VL/HCC (2005). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dourish, P., and Bellotti, V. Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proc. CSCW (1992). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Foster, I., Vöockler, J., Wilde, M., and Zhao, Y. Chimera: AVirtual Data System for Representing, Querying, and Automating Data Derivation. In Proc. SSDBM (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Froehlich, J., and Dourish, P. Unifying artefacts and activities in a visual tool for distributed software engineering teams. In Proc. ICSE (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jensen, C., Lonsdale, H., Wynn, E., Cao, J., Slater, M., and Dietterich, T. G. The life and times of files and information: a study of desktop provenance. In Proc. CHI (2010). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kantor, M., and Redmiles, D. Creating infrastructure for ubiquitous awareness. In Proc. INTERACT (2001).Google Scholar
- Karlson, A. K., Smith, G., and Lee, B. Which version is this?: improving the desktop experience within a copy-aware computing ecosystem. In Proc. CHI (2011). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kersten, M., and Murphy, G. C. Using task context to improve programmer productivity. In Proc. SIGSOFT (2006). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marshall, C., and Tang, J. That syncing feeling: early user experiences with the cloud. In Proc. DIS (2012). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Omoronyia, I., Ferguson, J., Roper, M., and Wood, M. A review of awareness in distributed collaborative software engineering. SPE (2010). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rader, E. Yours, mine and (not) ours: social influences on group information repositories. In Proc. CHI (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sultana, S., and Bertino, E. A file provenance system. In Proc. CODASPY (2013). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Voida, A., Olson, J. S., and Olson, G. M. Turbulence in the clouds: challenges of cloud-based information work. In Proc. CHI (2013). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Voida, S., Edwards, W. K., Newman, M. W., Griner, R. E., and Ducheneaut, N. Share and Share Alike: Exploring the User Interface Affordances of File Sharing. In Proc. CHI (2006). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Xu, J., Zhang, J., Harvey, T., and Young, J. A Survey of Asynchronous Collaboration Tools. Information Technology Journal (2008).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- MUBox: Multi-User Aware Personal Cloud Storage
Recommendations
Collaboard: a remote collaboration groupware device featuring an embodiment-enriched shared workspace
GROUP '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group WorkIn this paper we present a mixed presence groupware device called "CollaBoard". The device improves collaboration between co-located and remote partners by providing a high level of workspace awareness. This is achieved by superimposing a life-size ...
Collaboration Support for Activity Management in a Personal Cloud Environment
This paper describes a framework supporting the development of open collaboration environments which integrate heterogeneous business services. The framework facilitates the user cooperation in the execution of shared activities by offering a workspace ...
Groupspace: a 3D workspace supporting user awareness
CHI EA '02: CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsReal-time distributed groupware must support awareness of other users if collaborators are to work together effectively. Several techniques have been developed for enhancing awareness in two-dimensional shared workspaces, but less is known about how to ...
Comments