Extending and Supporting Featured User Interface Models for the Development of Groupware Applications

This paper presents a proposal to tackle the design and development of user interfaces for groupware applications. This proposal includes important design and implementation issues of special relevance for this kind of interfaces. In particular, group awareness requirements in the development of groupware applications are addressed, both in the sense of the basic manipulation actions of the interface widgets, as well as in the sense of other kinds of group awareness in relation to the presence of actors, the roles they play in a concrete moment, etc. The design proposal we present is part of a complete development process (called TOUCHE) which defines a set of facets to describe Abstract Interaction Objects. These objects, at design level, provide the basis for the definition of Concrete Interaction Objects at implementation level within a software platform intended to facilitate the development of user interfaces for groupware applications. This way, we get an integral approach to tackle the development of this kind of user interfaces, taking into account in an explicit way the perception of the joint activity of a group of users involved in a common task and thus achieving a more effective collaboration.