Usability Experiments for Determining Document-Related Awareness in Real-time Cooperative Editing

Distributed, collaborative editing of documents in a synchronous manner is increasingly becoming a very common and highly necessary task. It is, therefore, crucial to produce extremely easy-to-use editors facilitating this document-centered task. Providing awareness is a vital feature enhancing the usability of real-time cooperative document editing systems. Document-related awareness provides users with sufficient knowledge about the status of a document itself and all activities other users perform upon the document. This research develops a conceptual framework for workspace awareness in real-time cooperative document editing. This research exploits an intergrated approach—a “top-down” approach merged with a “bottom-up” approach—in determining highly suitable candidates for documentrelated awareness support mechanisms. This more relevant and complete approach has been ignored in other research. This research has found some new documentrelated awareness mechanisms, for instance, a dynamic users’ task list and toggle multi-user scrollbars. These are types of mechanism not revealed from the solely “bottom-up” approaches used in other research.