Collaborative Chat
2
...collaborative editing in
, requires users to have
of other users. However, this is not sufficient, as shown in .
This pattern provides a mechanism for collaborators in the group to coordinate with each other and share their views in real time.
In a remote collaboration environment, users need to exchange personal views and opinions, share information and/or sources of information, and help decide to reach a mutual understanding.
When editing documents online, along with other collaborators, users are faced with several challenges. Users may have ideas that can help in creating more content for the collaborative work in progress. This content may be self-created, found on internet, or even physically present at their site. However, because of the collective stake in the editing, users are usually required to introduce their idea and gain admittance from the other collaborators before it can be introduce in the collective work-in-progress. Besides, novel ideas, users can have views and opinions regarding the current status of their collective work. Instead of making annotations in the work and affecting it, they should be able to converse with each other. Finally, in the hour of decision making, they would need a sufficiently integrated mechanism for reaching a conclusion.
In a chat engine with multiple users, a message is preceded by the name of the participant who wrote that message. In the situations where there are many participants in a chat session, it may be difficult to determine who wrote the message. Also, participants do not know whether other participants are currently listening (i.e. reading the messages). Furthermore, there is no indication of the reaction of the listener. In voice conversation, the listener knows whenever, the speaker is talking. However, in most chat systems, the listener (reader) does not always receive any indication that other participants are typing. In these chat systems, the message is transmitted to participants only after the “Enter” key is pressed. Hence, the only indication that a participant is responding appears after the whole message is composed and received by the listener. This delay in receiving a response may be due to the slow typing speed of the participant, or long network latency delay. In either case, other participants, listeners, may simply treat it as a long pause before responding by the speaker. Such a long pause between a question and a reply may give the listener the perception of negative response. Participants may concurrently type messages. These messages will appear in the order determined by which site pressed the “Enter” key first. As the result, a pair of questions and answers (or messages on the same topic) may be interleaved by another pair of questions and answers, creating confusion.
Existing applications handle this issue differently. Google Docs provide the ability for users to chat with each other using GoogleTalk. However, this is not integrated with the Editing environment. Hence, falls short of providing seamless integration. This is shown in the picture.
Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. Each user has her own changeable color to be identified by others for an IRC-like chat for communicating with partners. As shown in the picture, the user list shows the online and offline participants. A separate window displays the chat log. However, there is no indication of whether the other user is reading the conversation or not. And, if yes, how do the different users manage the threading of their chats. This refers to the case of who is replying to who? For example, in a scenario with three collaborators, if the first two ask a different question simultaneously, and the third participant replies. Whose question was answered, remains a mystery.
Provide an integrated text chat engine, that displays the current status regarding the chat window of the participants, allows a unique color based differentiation, and allows linking of the responses by a user to one of the other users.
To chat with others, users should be presented with a , to find the intended participant. Users can also communicate with each other by commenting in the document itself. Refer to
, for more details. Users may also choose to perform
, while trying to reach a decision.
Nitesh Goyal, RWTH Aachen (Torsten.Palm@rwth-aachen.de)
1.1
January 25, 2009
January 25, 2009
This pattern is part of the project "Pattern Language for Collaborative Text Editing" (lecture HCIDP at RWTH Aachen, Winter Term 08/09).