WYSIWIS Revisited: Early Experiences With Multiuser Interfaces Mark Stefik Daniel G. Bobrow Greg Foster Stan Lanning Deborah G. Tatar Proceedings of CSCW 1986, Austin, TX

Why we use the term, “et alia” (and others) ALL WERE AT XEROX PARC:  Mark Stefik Mark Stefik Mark Stefik  At PARC since 1980  Works with creativity, collaboration, and expression  Daniel G. Bobrow Daniel G. Bobrow Daniel G. Bobrow  Greg Foster  Stan Lanning  Deborah G. Tatar Mark Stefik Daniel Bobrow

COLAB Project ( ) 

What’s it all about?  Workers spend a lot of time in meetings.  Small working groups (2-6 people) often collaborate together in such meetings.  What you see is what I see is a driving design abstraction in most multi-user interfaces.  The perfect example is a chalkboard.  Strictly holding to WYSIWIS is too limiting, thus the authors describe methods to adapt to real-use conditions as observed in the COLAB project.  20 (!) issues raised in course of paper, not recapitulated here!

Case 1: Boardnoter  Meeting tool meant to resemble chalkboard in terms of use.  Allows text entry, drawing, erasing, and telepointing.  Many, many, many issues and possible design solutions to them listed on pages (Baecker)  Real meeting rooms sometimes have multiple chalkboards – shrunken versions (stampsheet)  Still an extremely preliminary system, thus further study necessary.  This version: lacks copying, moving, resizing, grouping, neatening. These features would raise yet other issues.

Case 2: Cognoter  Tool for organizing information in meetings.  Three stages in a Cognoter meeting:  Brainstorming – public window, any user can type in phrases without waiting for turns  Organizing Ideas – creating links between items and creating subgroups of ideas  Evaluating Ideas – combining subgroup results, pruning ideas into group product, Cognoter can produce outlines and highlight ambiguities in ordering.

Cognoter & Lightweight Collaboration  Small subgroups form often during the collaborative process.  Want to avoid cluttering users’ displays  To support this, two alternatives are explored: stampsheets and Rooms.  Want users to be able to tell when something’s happened, draw attention to the public, possibly open group window to public attention, etc.  Rooms requires an overview room allowing users to view overall progress. Public rooms can exist which are in the same place for everyone. Subgroups become more isolated, and users can’t follow activity except in overview room.

Thoughts, Conclusions, Discussion  The authors make cogent suggestions as to the important of relaxing “strict” What You See is What I see.  To what extent are highly-productive collaborations of 2-6 individuals unique to PARC? (“Many of the design decisions for Colab […] turn fundamentally on expectations for the size of the […] group.”)  To what extent do (as the authors allege) such groups “frequently” subdivide into subgroups of 1-3? Sounds a bit more like kindergarten projects than my 7 years of workplace meeting experience.  Are stampsheets useful in non-collaborative settings? Minimized views that allow for degree of change measurement without disrupting workflow (i.e. Windows taskbar: “75% done”)  As resolutions available on desktop systems (standard resolution is probably XGA (1024x768) today, whereas even 5 years ago SVGA (800x600) was more typical. Both 1280x1024 and 1600x1280 are seen today. “Real estate” may eliminate need for both stampsheets and Rooms in terms of collaboration (1280x1024 is 4 times larger than 640x480 after all, and in 1986 they probably didn’t have much more than that.)