Ask an Expert: Mobile Workspaces for Collaborative Troubleshooting

A key driver of enterprise adoption of consumer mobile devices is their potential to support collaboration. However, today there is little understanding of how well mobile devices support collaborative work activities in the enterprise. We present Ask an Expert, a tablet-based collaboration application for mobile industrial workers. Ask an Expert combines communication channels and content sharing tools in persistent ´spaces´ to support collaborative troubleshooting between remote workers. We describe the user-centered design of Ask an Expert and provide design recommendations for mobile collaboration applications. We also discuss findings from preliminary user evaluations.