The Meeting Journey: Supporting the Design of Interaction Within Co-located, Collaborative Device Ecologies

Ammeloot, Aurélien

Abstract

The combination of personal and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technologies with augmented "smart" spaces designed for collaborative work offers new design challenges for the HCI community. This thesis looks at how BYOD technologies can integrate with such spaces in the context of cross-channel collaboration, from a user experience (UX) perspective. In addition to this, the work looks at how BYOD technologies can replace smart spaces entirely and form space-agnostic collaborative device ecologies.

A series of qualitative empirical studies were undertaken that led to the development of the concept of a meeting journey. The meeting journey is an abstract representation of the different steps, tools and activities undertaken by users in the context of a co- located collaborative activity aimed to inform the design of such systems. The meeting journey helped define a series of design principles for collaborative device ecologies.

Whilst the longitudinal aspects of collaboration have been well covered by work in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and supported by a number of commercial products, the UX of co-located ad hoc meetings have not. Such meetings are still characterised by difficult and awkward interactions due to different technologies, levels of computer literacy and processes.

The concept proposed to improve the desirability of collaborative device ecologies following the design principles previously defined is based on a hybrid approach, built on an extensible framework nicknamed “OIL”. The sharing activities specific to ad hoc collaborative meetings are delegated to a consistent user interface, whilst the ecology retains a platform-agnostic philosophy as to which applications and devices are used by the participants.

The final part of the thesis relates the development of a proof-of-concept hybrid system inspired by OIL, and its evaluation using desirability metrics. This leads to a discussion of the possibilities of extensions to the proof of concept, including support for more steps of the meeting journey, a broader set of functionalities, and a broader range of issues such as security and data ownership.

Citation

Ammeloot, A. The Meeting Journey: Supporting the Design of Interaction Within Co-located, Collaborative Device Ecologies. (Thesis). Edinburgh Napier University. http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2376807

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Dec 6, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 6, 2019
• Keywords: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD); user experience (UX); cross-channel collaboration; meeting journey; smart spaces
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2376807
• Award Date: Oct 30, 2019