From crazed to focused: Designing user interfaces for effective group collaboration and awareness

Todaypsilas information workers are characterized by their ability to easily handle interruptions, to multi-task, task switch on a dime and make sense of enormous amounts of information in high pressure situations. In addition, current and future technologies, including various wearables and sensing devices, ensure that robust communications and information transmissions can occur just about anywhere, at any time, and to anyone. Finally, our ability to log, collect and visualize event data becomes ever more sophisticated, allowing us to analyze trends and identify patterns across many areas of individual and group behavior. How do we use these technological trends to ensure that we are designing tools that improve productivity, insight, and an overall sense of user control in groups of users? In this talk, I will discuss our research approach to the group-centered design of advanced user interfaces, and I will describe a few of our more recent research projects by way of example.