Design a Media item for the Community Bar

You have been hired as a summer assistant to work on the Community Bar Project, a groupware system that makes it easy for a small group to stay aware of each other, to post common information, and to move into conversation and work. The current set of notifications allows people to post data (such as web sites), awareness information (such as snapshot video) and to communicate (real time text chat). Your job is to build a new type of groupware media item that can be posted to the Community Bar. You have complete freedom of your design, but you must identify the intended audience, and argue why the notification is useful for them, and that its design is somewhat impressive. As well, the media item should show a clear progression from awareness information to somewhat more detailed information and interaction to full details and interaction (via the three types of items you can create). The design should also be visually appealing and impressive, as your boss wants to use your work as a convincing and aesthetic example of what can be done with their architecture.

Objectives

• You will apply your knowledge of notifications and groupware to design a notification system suitable for a particular community
• You will generate sketched designs in your sketchbook of possible notifications and how your audience will use it
• You will produce a modest paper prototype illustrating your design, and will present it for critique
• You will implement and package your design on the class web site so others can try it.
• You will create a portfolio summary of this design based on the idea of a book.

Pedagogical Objectives

• Transform your theoretical knowledge of notifications (as taught in class and garnered through the readings) to design
• Develop skills designing and implementing usable notification systems.
• Learn how to use a notification infrastructure, such as a notification server/shared dictionary
• Start thinking in terms of multimedia as design opportunities
• Practice techniques for prototyping and implementing designs
• Engage in design critiques

What you will be given

Gregor McEwan will give you his prototype Community Bar system and media item designer tutorial/tester, designed to simplify the development process of notifications and groupware. See

• Community bar web page to download the Community Bar

• Media items web page to download the media item test environment and for tutorials

Criteria

• Read your notes and articles on the community bar and other notification systems.
• Scan the web for ideas, or look at existing systems to see how they include notifications (e.g., software updates, stock tickers, etc). Feel free to re-design existing systems.
• Brainstorm several notifications by :
  • describing several audiences (friends, family, workgroups)
  • describing information they may be interested in receiving as a notification
  • sketching the design of the three levels of notifications and how they lead to interaction
  • sketching what would happen if the poster haddifferent powers than others
• Compare ideas with your classmates, and synthesize new ideas based upon feedback. 
• Feel free to work together so that your notifications complement one another.
• Implement your design
• Package your implementation, and create a visual summary of it on the web site, and as a paper prototype using a book idea.

Evaluation

Evaluation will be somewhat stricter than in project 1. As before, your exercise will be very loosely based on the following breakdown. However, great successes − or failures − in one exercise criteria will likely affect your total grade. Note that a successful implementation is required: if you cannot demonstrate your system, you will automatically receive a zero.

• Sketches: ~1/5 of your grade
• Design creativity: ~1/5 of your grade
• Implementation, documentation and packaging:: ~2/5 of your grade
• Portfolio summary: ~1/5 of your grade

Possible ideas

These are in no particular order. Note that some of these are easy, others are very difficult. I just brainstormed these quickly; try and come up with your own. One trick is to take any existing notification  and ask yourself what it would be like if you could post it to multiple people and how they would act on it

• see the readings below - there are several ideas in each of them
• post an arbitrary image as a notification, where others could make it larger, and then we could interact over it through a simple multi-user sketch system ie., where we can draw atop the image simultaneously
• a group scheduling system, where we could add individual events as notifications to the schedule, and where the system would notify us of events coming up
• notify others of interesting things found on the web
• tie a notification to changing information somewhere on the web (e.g., weather, avalanche reports) where the notification would update itself automatically and tell me when things have changed
• post a series of pictures as a slide show, but where people who receive it can view images at larger sizes through a simple slide show control
• send a voice broadcast to the group as a notification
• redo tickertape (see last reading below)...

Readings

• McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005)
  Supporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar. Proceedings of the ACM Group 2005 Conference, ACM Press.

• Cadiz, JJ., Gina Danielle Venolia, Gavin Jancke, Anoop Gupta.
  Sideshow: Providing Peripheral Awareness of Important Information.  September 14th, 2001. Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-83, Microsoft Research.

• McEwan, G., and Greenberg, S. (2005)
  Community Bar (The Video) (AVI). Video Proceedings of ECSCW - European

• (optional) Fass, A., Forlizzi, J., Pausch, R. (2002).
  MessyDesk and MessyBoard: Two Designs Inspired By the Goal of Improving Human Memory. DIS 2002 Designing Interactive Systems, 303-311.

• (optional) Greenberg, S. and Rounding, M. (2001)
  The Notification Collage: Posting Information to Public and Personal Displays.  Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [CHI Letters 3(1)], 515-521, ACM Press. Revised from Report 2000-667-19.

• (optional) Fitzpatrick, G. and Kaplan, S. (In submission)
  Supporting Public Availability and Accessibility with Elvin. J CSCW, 11(3) 2002. Submission copy.

• (optional) Cadiz, JJ., Susan Fussell, Robert Kraut, F. Javier Lerch, and William Scherlis. 
  The Awareness Monitor: A Coordination Tool for Asynchronous, Distributed Work Teams.  Unpublished manuscript.  Demonstrated at the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 98).