Online Communication in Student Product Design Teams

Abstract

New technological developments are changing how the product design community communicates in the workplace and in the classroom. Slack, an online communication application with some project management features, has become a popular communication tool among many workers and students. This paper examines the Slack conversation conducted by 16 student product development teams in a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2.009: Product Engineering Processes. Following a typical product development process, co-located teams of 17-20 students each used the online communication tool in addition to face-to-face meetings to design new products in one semester. The resulting conversations were analyzed for message count over the course of the semester, message count by day of the week and hour of the day, message count by user, and communication organization. It was observed that teams tended to increase their communication right before deadlines and decrease it right after. When viewing teams' communication patterns by day of the week and the hour of the day, it was seen that many teams increased their communication in a short period after team meetings. In both of these cases, successful teams tended to have more consistent communication. There was little correlation (R2=2186) between the number of hours teams reported working on the class and their Slack activity by day. When looking at a team's total volume of communication, high volumes may indicate team members are working well, but it may also indicate they are struggling. Teams with higher levels of success tended to have more organized communication structures than teams with lower levels of success, as assessed by instructors. In addition to the data collected in this work, further research is still needed to understand with more certainty how online communication patterns correlate to teams' levels of success or team behaviors.