On the Development and Usability of a Diagram-based Collaborative Brainstorming Component

The need for computer-supported collaboration has grown over the last years and made collaboration an important factor within organizations. This trend has resulted in the development of a variety of tools and technologies to support the various forms of collaboration. Many collaborative processes, e.g. strategy building, scenario analysis, root cause analysis and requirements engineering, require various collaboration support tools. Data flow, fishbone and brainstorming diagrams, play an important role within these synchronous collaborative applications to create, evaluate, elaborate, discuss, and revise graphical models. Currently, the necessary tools are not integrated and flexible enough to support such processes. In this paper, a synchronous collaborative brainstorming diagram editor integrated in a flexible group support system is described. This approach goes beyond the current state of the art as it can be seamlessly integrated with other collaboration support tools such as text-based brainstorming or voting. The usability of the taken approach is evaluated within a case study on collaborative learning.