CollaboRanger: Coordinating Differences of Individuals in Group Coordination

Abstract

People form habits in the way they work and former research in personal task and information management found that these personal preferences vary drastically. In collaborative settings, these different forms of personal habits can make it challenging to coordinate among teammates. In this work, we investigate the methodology of a smooth transition from the personal working sphere to group coordination. Through our workshop study with 11 knowledge workers including program coordinators and admins, we understand how they manage the gap between personal differences and lead to group coordination. Our finding indicates that even for the mundane and basic coordination tasks like scheduling a meeting task, there are several underlying conflicts, such as fear of being judged and overstepping others’ contributions. Instead, they focus on accommodating differences of each participant (e.g., in the case of scheduling, tools that they use for keeping up with schedules) and spend a substantial amount of time aggregating information in different formats for each participant.

We propose a system called CollaboRanger, where coordination participants do not have to change their habits for each coordination, but at the same time, it is easy to combine information from each. Using CollaboRanger, coordination participants can collaboratively gather responses from the participants in a table and summarize their decisions. To evaluate our system, we conducted a within-subjects experiment (N=18) to assess our design with knowledge workers. We found that when teams are using our system, they were able to sensemake distinct responses comprised of personal preference and tool choices much easier and faster than using email. These results indicate that one does not have to totalize the individual’s response when they coordinate, yet they can still efficiently make group decisions. We conclude with design implications and opportunities for bridging gaps between personal work routines and groupware designs.