Designing Visualizations to Support Collaborative Environments

A. Feinman, M. Farry, R. Kilgore, and J. Pfautz

To appear in Proceedings of the 8th Symposium on Human Interaction with Complex Systems (HICS), Norfolk, VA (April, 2008)

Designing software systems to support teams of decision-makers requires special attention to providing visualizations that support awareness of collaborators, the ability to negotiate meaning, and the ability to coordinate actions. In this paper, we describe software visualization techniques that we have created to serve as infrastructure for constructing collaborative working environments. These visualizations build on existing literature regarding the impact of representation choice on team work, and seek to provide fundamental capabilities necessary for building systems that actively support effective collaboration.

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