Extended radar view and modification director: awareness mechanisms for synchronous collaborative authoring

Providing effective support for group awareness is a critical requirement of synchronous collaborative authoring tools. This paper reports our work on developing new awareness mechanisms including Extended Radar View (ERV) and Modification Director (MD) for CoWord, a synchronous collaborative authoring tool that is developed based on Microsoft Word. ERV supports awareness for collaborative authoring tasks by showing both users’ telecarets-eye views—the locations of working areas—and over-the-shoulder views—the locations of viewing areas in a shared Word document. MD keeps track of changes in the document, and notifies users when their text is modified by other people. This paper also reports an ongoing user-based study that is conducted to evaluate the usefulness of ERV and MD. The preliminary results show that ERV is useful in supporting group awareness, and ERV is preferred to a conventional radar view. MD was found useful to some extent in supporting awareness for collaborative authoring.