Social aspects of HCI:

designing for collaboration and

communication
 Overview
• Conversation with others
• Awareness of others
• How to support people to be able to:
– talk and socialise
– work together
– play and learn together
 Conversation with others
• Various mechanisms and ‘rules’ we
follow to hold a conversation
– mutual greetings
A: Hi there
B: Hi!
C: Hi
A: All right?
C: Good, How’s it going?
A: Fine, how are you?
C: OK
B: So-so. How’s life treating you?
 Conversational rules
• turn-taking to coordinate conversation
– A: Shall we meet at 8?
– B: Um, can we meet a bit later?

– A: Shall we meet at 8?
– B: Wow, look at him?
– A: Yes what a funny hairdo!
– B: Um, can we meet a bit later?

• Back channeling to signal to continue and

following
– Uh-uh, umm, ahh
 More conversational rules
• farewell rituals
– Bye then, see you, yer bye, see you later….

• implicit and explicit cues

– e.g. looking at watch, fidgeting with coat
and bags
– explicitly saying “Oh dear, must go, look at
the time, I’m late…”
Breakdowns in conversation

• When someone says something

that is misunderstood
– Speaker will repeat with emphasis:
A: “this one?”
B: “no, I meant that one!”
– Also use tokens:
Eh? Quoi? Huh? What?
What happens in technology-
mediated conversations?
• Do same conversational rules apply?
• Are there more breakdowns?
• How do people repair them?
– Phone?
– Email?
– Instant messaging
– SMS texting?
 Design implications
• How to support conversations when people are
‘at a distance’ from each other
• Many applications have been developed
– Email, videoconferencing, videophones, computer
conferencing, instant messaging, chatrooms,
collaborative virtual environments, media spaces

• How effective are they?

• Do they mimic or extend existing ways of
conversing?
 Synchronous computer-
mediated communication
• Conversations are supported in real-time through voice
and/or typing
• Examples include video conferencing and chatrooms
• Benefits
– Can keep more informed of what is going on
– Video conferencing allows everyone to see each other
providing some support for non-verbal communication
– Chatrooms can provide a forum for shy people to talk more
• Problems:
– Video lacks bandwidth so judders and lots of shadows
– Difficult to establish eye contact with images of others
– People can behave badly when behind the mask of an
avatar
Will video be a success using
G3 mobile phones?
• Will the judder, sudden jerks and shadows
disappear?
• Will it be possible to establish eye contact
and read lips on such a small image?
• Will people find it socially acceptable to
talk to an image of someone in the palm of
their hands?

The VP-210" VisualPhone: a mobile video phone developed by the japanese

company Kyocera Corporation
Source: http://www.kyocera.co.jp/news/1999/9905/0003-e.asp
 Asynchronous
communication
• Communication takes place remotely at different times
• Email, newsgroups, computer conferencing
• Benefits include:
– Read any place any time
– Flexible as to how to deal with it
– Powerful, can send to many people
– Can make saying things easier
• Problems include:
– FLAMING!!!
– Spamming
– Message overload
– False expectations as to when people will reply
 New communication
technologies
• Move beyond trying to support face-to-face
communication
• Provide novel ways of interacting and talking

• Examples include:
– SMS texting via mobile phones
– Online chatting in chatrooms
– Collaborative virtual environments
– Media spaces
 Collaborative virtual
environments

The rooftop garden in BowieWorld, a Collaborative Virtual environment

(CVE), supported by Worlds.com. Users take part by “dressing up” as
an avatar. There are 100s of avatars to choose from, including
penguins and real persons. Once an avatar has entered a world they
can explore it and chat to other avatars.
Source: www.worlds.com/bowie
 VideoWindow system
(Bellcore, 1989)
• a shared space that allowed people 50 miles
apart to carry on a conversation as if in same
room drinking coffee together
• 3 x 8 ft ‘picture-window’ between two sites
with video and audio
• People did interact via the window but strange
things happened (Kraut, 1990)
 Findings of how VideoWindow
System was used

• Talked constantly about the system

• Spoke more to other people in the same room
rather than in other room
• When tried to get closer to someone in other
place had opposite effect - went out of range
of camera and microphone
• No way of monitoring this
 Hypermirror (Morikawa and
Maesako, 1998)
– allows people to feel as if they are in the same
virtual place even though in physically different
spaces

(woman in white
sweater is in a
People in different different room to
places are superimposed the other three)
on the same screen
to make them appear as if
in same space
 Creating personal space in
Hypermirror

2) Two in this room are invading 3) Two in the room move

the ‘virtual’ personal space apart to allow person
of the other person by appearing to be in other space more ‘virtual’
physically on top of them personal space
Everyone happy
 Awareness of others

• Involves knowing who is around, what is

happening, and who is talking with whom
• Peripheral awareness
– keeping an eye on things happening in the periphery
of vision
– Overhearing and overseeing - allows tracking of
what others are doing without explicit cues
 Designing technologies to
support greater awareness

• Provide awareness of others who are in

different locations
• Media spaces - “extend the world of desks,
chairs, walls and ceilings” (Harrison et al,
1997)
– Examples: Clearboard, Portholes and Cruiser
Clearboard (Ishii et al, 1993)
– ClearBoard - transparent board that shows
other person’s facial expression on your
board as you draw
 Portholes (Xerox PARC)
Regularly updated digitized images of people in their
offices appeared on everyone’s desktop machines
throughout day and night
 Notification systems
• Users notify others as opposed to being
constantly monitored (cf Portholes)
• Provide information about shared objects and
progress of collaborative tasks

– Examples: Tickertape, Babble

 Tickertape (Segall and
Arnold, 1997)
• Tickertape is a scrolling one-line window,
going from left to right
• Group name, sender’s name and text message
 Babble (IBM, Erickson et al, 1999)
Circle with
marbles
represents
people
taking part in
conversation in
a chatroom.

Those in the
middle
are doing the
most
chatting.

Those towards
the outside
are less
active in
the
conversation.
 Key points
• Social mechanisms, like turn-taking, conventions,
etc., enable us to collaborate and coordinate our
activities
• Keeping aware of what others are doing and letting
others know what you are doing are important
aspects of collaborative working and socialising
• Many collaborative technologies (groupware or
CSCW) systems have been built to support
collaboration, especially communication and
awareness