A user study of edit profiles in collaborative authoring systems

Various studies have shown that despite the significant body of research into providing awareness in collaborative authoring systems, existing tools often fail to meet user expectations. Taking into account user needs as reported in these studies, we designed a novel, flexible awareness tool that allows users to view editing activity at different granularity levels based on a notion of edit profiles. We extended an asynchronous collaborative editor to include our awareness tool and report here on a user study to determine whether the awareness information computed and presented by edit profiles meets user expectations.