CollabLogger: A Tool for Visualizing Groups at Work

The CollabLogger is a visual tool that supports usability analyses of human-computer interaction in a team environment. Participants in our computer-mediated activity were engaged in a small-scale manufacturing testbed project. Interactions of the group were mediated by Teamwave Workplace and the members performed both synchronous and asynchronous activities depending on their availability, project requirements, and due to chance meetings in the collaborative space. The software was instrumented to log users’ interactions with the system and each other. The CollabLogger addresses the problem of helping investigators analyze the volumes of log data that groupware tools can generate. Visual tools are powerful when large amounts of diverse data present themselves. The place-based collaboration environment offered by Teamwave Workplace provided a level of organization that allowed us to create a visual interface with which to perform exploratory sequential data analysis. Preliminary use of the tool shows that usability engineers can employ the visual display to form hypotheses about subject’s interactions with the GUI interface and with each other.