In-Class Activity #4:
Collaboration and Communication

Overview and Learning Objectives

The specific learning objectives of this in-class collaborative activity are:

• to practice evaluating collaborative technologies with respect to both social and cognitive principles; and
• to explore social phenemona that arise out of virtual communities.

Note: This activity, and the heuristics that you will be exploring within it, are adapted from pp. 418 and 419 of the Preece text.

Heuristics for On-Line Communities

Preece (2000) suggests that the following questions can be used to develop heuristics for evaluating on-line social communities (taken from p. 695 of the Preece text):

• Sociability: Why should I join this community? (What are the benefits for me? Does the description of the group, its name, its location in the website, the graphics, etc., tell me about the purpose of the group?)
• Usability: How do I join (or leave) the community (What do I do? Do I have to register or can I just post, and ist his a good thin?)
• Sociability: What are the rules? (Is there anything I shouldn't do? Are the expectations for communal behavior made clear? Is there someone who checks that people are behaving reasonably?)
• Usability: How di I get, read and send messages? (Is there support for newcomers? Is it clear what I should do? Are templates provided? Can I send private messages?
• Usability: Can I do what I want to do easily? (Can I navigate the site? Do I feel comfortable interacting with the software? Can I find the information and people I want?)
• Sociability: Is the community safe? (Are my comments treated with respect? Is my personal information secure? Do people make aggressive or unaccceptable remarks to each other?)
• Sociability: Can I experss myself as I wish? (Is there a way of expressing emotions, such as emoticons? Can I show people what I look like or reveal aspects of my character? Can I see others? Can I determine who esle is present--perhaps people are watching bu not sending messages?)
• Sociability: Do people reciprocate? (If I can contribute will others contribute comments, support and answer my questions?)
• Sociability: Why shoudl I come back? (What makes the experience worthwhile? What's in it for me? Do I feel part fo a thriving community? Are there interesting people with whom to communicate? Are there interesting events?)

You'll use these questions as a starting point for this week's activity.

Steps

1. Begin by splitting into groups of two to four.
2. Select a site to analyze. Acceptable sites include any site that has bulletin or discussion boards to which people can post (e.g., the communities area in REI.com). Note only one group may analyze a given site; before proceeding, be sure to check that other groups haven't already taken a site you are interested in.
3. Familiarize yourself with the site you are analyzing by doing the following:
• read some messages
• post messages
• reply to a message
• search for information
• look at how many messages have been sent and how recently they have been sent
• see whether you can see the physical relationship between messages easily
• notice whether you can post to people privately using e-mail
• see whether you can get a sense of what other people are like and the emotional content of their messages
• see whetehr there is a sense of community and of individuals being present
4. Use the nine questions for on-line social communities (see above) to evaluate the site. Comment on your site with respect to each of the questions. How well do the questions work as heuristics for evaluating your site with respect to both usability and sociability issues?
5. Which of Nielsen's heuristics (which you applied last week) would be appropriate for evaluating this site? Perform an evaluation of the site with respect to those heuristics as well.
6. We will stop groupwork 15 minutes before the end of class in order to discuss what we found. Be prepared to discuss your group's findings with the entire class.

Assignment Option #4

Note: As stated in the course syllabus, you are required to hand in at least three assignment options, one from each of the three major sections of the course (Background and Theory, Designing Interactive Systems, Evaluating Interactive Systems). In other words you need to hand in

1. assignment option #1, 2, 3, or 4;
2. assignment option #5, 6, or 7; and
3. assignment option #8.

Assignment Tasks

1. Pick an on-line community site that neither your group, nor any other group, considered in the studio activity. The community site must minimally support a community through bulletin or discussion boards; however, it may be interesting to consider sites that include other innovative community-supporting technologies (e.g., virtual worlds in which members can interact). .

2. In a paragraph or two, describe the site that you have chosen. Include its web address. Who are the users? Why might they visit the site?

3. Familiarize yourself with the site, as described in setp 3 above. In a few paragraphs, describe what you did, and what your impressions were.

4. Use the nine questions listed above to evaluate the site. Comment on your site with respect to each of the questions. How well do the questions work as heuristics for evaluating your site with respect to both usability and sociability issues?

5. Use the nine questions for on-line social communities (see above) to evaluate the site. Comment on your site with respect to each of the questions. How well do the questions work as heuristics for evaluating your site with respect to both usability and sociability issues?

6. Which of Nielsen's heuristics (which you applied last week) would be appropriate for evaluating this site? Perform an evaluation of the site with respect to those heuristics as well.

Additional Research Task for Graduate Students

Read the ACM SIGCHI 2002 conference paper entitled "Designing for improved social responsibility, user participation and content in on-line communities Communities and Organizations by S. Kelly, C. Sung, and S. Farnham. . It is available on-line at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/503376.503446. (Make sure you're inside the WSU firewall before accessing this document; otherwise, you will not have access to the full PDF of the article.) This article describes general characteristics of highly successful on-line communities.

Prepare a two page (double-spaced, 1" margins) critical review of the article. Your critical review should not only identify the key points of the material, but also analyze and critique its underlying perspective. The following list of questions provides a useful starting point for your critical review:

• Who are the authors? What is their academic history? From what intellectual perspective are they coming? What are their biases?
• What are the key points of the article?
• Are there any gaps in logic or presentation? How could the presentation or argument of the article be improved?
• How does the article compare, and fit in, to others you've read on this topic (if any)?
• What do you like about the article? What do you not like? Why?

Deliverables and Grading

By the deadline, hand in a hardcopy written report that includes a section that addresses each of the assignment tasks described above. Your report must have a title page with "Assignment Option #3" displayed prominently in bold at the center of the page; your name, the name of this course, and the date should appear in smaller type below the title.

We will use this assessment form to evaluate your work. The critical review required of graduate students will be evaluated according to this assessment form. Be sure you that carefully read these forms ahead of time, so that you can take the assessment framework into account as you write your report.