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Designing Group Annotations and Process Visualizations for Role-Based Collaboration

Gregorio Convertino, Anna Wu, Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang, Craig H. Ganoe,

Blaine Hoffman and John M. Carroll

The Pennsylvania State University

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Background

• Role-based collaboration – E.g., emergency management

• Common ground (CG)– Mutual knowledge, beliefs, and protocols– A precondition for efficient teamwork

•E.g., “a blind pass”

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Previous Research

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Public Works

EnvironmentalMass Care

Face-to-Face &

Computer-Supported Collaboration (CSCW)

EnvironmentalMass Care

Public Works

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Public Works

Mass Care

E.M. Team Map

Environ-mental

Experimenter

Public Works

EnvironmentalMass Care

Paper Study: Face-to-Face

Setting

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CSCWSetting

EnvironmentalExperimenterMass Care

one-way windows

Public Works

EnvironmentalMass Care

Public Works

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Research Focuses• Does common ground increase?

– Does it increase as people collaborate? – What are the effects of the media (FtF vs. CSCW)?

• How does it increase? – What are the underlying patterns and contents of

communication?

• What are the implications for theory and design? – What explanations can we offer about CG building?– What tools can be used to increase the support for CG?

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Experimental Studies• Emergency management planning on maps

– Find the best shelter among four to rescue a family from a flooded area– Also consider two alternative shelters.

• Three roles– Public works, Environmental, and Mass Care experts

• Task materials– Member

• Role-specific map• Role description• List of 15 “cons” about shelters (8 unshared and 7 shared risks)

– Each expert is biased toward a particular non-optimal solution.

– Team• Large map• Background information on the problem

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Findings• Common ground increases through collaboration.

– Process measures• Perceived common ground and awareness increase.• Communication efficiency increases.• Recall of alternative plans increases.

– Outcome measures• Performance and satisfaction increase

– Completion time shortened.– Plan optimality increases.

• Computer tools improve performances.– CSCW groups faster than paper groups – Higher initial plan optimality in CSCW groups than paper

groups

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New Questions• How to help users better process and utilize large and

dynamic information corpora in decision-making under uncertainty?– Limited cognitive resources

• Cannot remember all relevant information• Slow in sorting relevant information

– Bias in decision-making• Stick to more familiar solutions• Stick to solutions proposed earlier

• Our approach to address these issues – Externalizing critical information to improve the outcomes and

processes of decision-making.

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Design Requirements• Reducing cognitive load with information

visualization– Categorizing and aggregating massive data– Grouping complex, dense datasets in ways that

can be easily perceived• Reducing decision bias with information

visualization– Supporting information review and comparison– Providing spatial and temporal context

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Design

• Annotation construction– Information sharing

• Annotation aggregation

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Design (Cont.)

• Annotation classification and aggregation

• Annotation temporal context visualization

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System Screenshots

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• Java-based system– Collaboration support

• Our in-house BRIDGE toolkits to support group work– Basic Resources for Integrated Distributed Group Environments.

– Geo-information visualization support• GeoTools

– Open source GIS tools

– General visualization support• Java Swing

System Implementation

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Software Architecture

CORK duplicates shared objects and propagates changes among multiple role-specific clients

Shared awareness dataZoom factor, viewports, role codes, selection

Shared dataFeatures and styles

Telepointer role indication

ProcessVisualization

Annotate Transfer Dual-pointer

Dual-view and Tool Manager

Annotation VisualizationTools

View

Data

ServerGeoTools geospatial data

architecture

J2EE

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Pilot Study

Stimuli1. Bar chart: overview of cons (risks) by shelter2. Timeline: overview of actions by role and time

Research Questions1. The bar chart visualization will help the group to

reduce judgment bias toward one shelter2. The timeline visualization will encourage team

members to contribute more.

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Pilot Study

• 3-member team – 2 confederates + 1 participant

• Planning Task– Choose the best shelter and rank the

others• Manipulation

– Induce early judgment bias• Contents and order of annotations

manipulated by the confederates.• Confederates’ actions are scripted.

2020

Study Design

Part 1Bar Chart

(run 1)Bar Chart

(run 2)Timeline(run 3)

Part 2No Bar Chart

(run 1)No Bar Chart

(run 2)No Timeline

(run 3)

Part 3Bar Chart

(run 1)Bar Chart

(run 2)No Timeline

(run 3)

Part 4 No Bar Chart(run 1)

No Bar Chart(run 2)

Timeline(run 3)

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Preliminary Observations

• More profound discussions on decisions.– Individual annotations vs. Comparing and reviewing

relevant annotations– Simple count vs. Criticality of annotations

• Task completion time– Faster to find shelters with the least cons– Facilitating information processing with sorted, color-

coded, and contextualized information

• Decision bias– Participants indicated visualization helped on

evaluating different choices.– Despite confederates’ efforts to mislead the result.

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Next Step• Conduct formal experiments to study the effectiveness

and efficiency of these two visualization tools in decision-making– Tweaking tasks

• Giving annotations different weights– Improving visualization tools

• Visualization tools to support more complex processes– Situational awareness

• Dynamic– Multi-scale and multi-facet information clustering and

aggregation• Support analysis across different scale level.• Support information classification and aggregation from different

aspects.

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More Information

• Common ground project– http://cscl.ist.psu.edu