Collaborative Pointers
2
...collaborative editing in
, requires users to have
of other users. This pattern provides a mechanism for collaborators to be aware of the location of each other's mouse pointer.
Collaborative Pointers provide users with information about the location of the other collaborators' locus of attention, to help provide a visual cue of where the next location of action might be.
When editing documents online, along with other collaborators, users need to know the location of pointers of the other users. However, since the users use only their own pointer to edit, it leads to cognitive overload to display multiple pointers. This location of pointer is important because it might be the location of user interest. A user might be reading that word, might want to edit the text there, add a media object there. However, the pointer might even have no relevance to the user's interests. It just might be lying lazily on the screen. Thus, the pointer should not only be able to reflect the location, but the intensity of user interest at that location, also. This means, that, chiefly, there exist two problems: First, to represent users' locations of interest, with ample segregation. Secondly, to reflect the intensity of interest, without cognitive overload.
CoWord creates a collaborative layer over the existing stand alone desktop word editor. It provides real time color coded mouse pointers. Each user is assigned a unique color and her position is shown on the screen with the respective colored mouse pointer. This is a good solution; however, this does not reflect the intensity of the user's interest at that location. This is shown in the picture below.
ReColEd solves this problem by introducing unique avatars. Each avatar shows a different state of the user: typing, pointing, highlighting etc. However, this information is additional to the cognitive load caused by multiple pointers which have no color coding. Thus, a user must find the mouse pointers, and look at the avatars on the screen corner to decipher their intensity of interest. It is shown in the picture below.
Thus, a better idea would be to map the intensity of interest to the mouse pointer itself. This can be done by creating a small glowing halo around the pointer. While typing or deleting characters, when the level of intensity is higher, the glow can be brighter. In case of a lazy pointer, the glow can be reduced to a low value.
Provide information regarding location of interest of the collaborators in the document by individual color coded mouse pointers representing the locus of interest and an aural halo around this pointer that glows brighter with increasing intensity of the interest.
To have a general information about what the other users are seeing on their screen, users can utilize . Users can also notice the level of interaction and view a limited information regarding level of interest in
.
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).