|
Change Awareness is the ability to track
the changes of others in a collaborative project. In this thesis, I
develop a framework for understanding how change awareness can be
applied to 2D graphical applications. This framework articulates basic
informational elements needed by a person to track changes in these
systems. Additionally, I discuss the fundamental concepts for
displaying these informational elements. These include the crucial
display dimensions (placement, presentation and persistence), methods
for reducing the time and effort to acquire and understand the
information, mechanisms for displaying the elements, and filtering
changes to avoid overload. Finally, I demonstrate the value of both the
framework and the display concepts by showing how they can be used to
critique a change awareness tool implemented as a part of my
investigations. The critique not only pinpointed the weaknesses of the
tool but how it could be redesigned to better support change awareness.
|