Window Adjust
2
...in collaborative -environments multiple users like to be able to execute in order to adjust the application to ones own needs. Therefore, resizing, minimizing, maximizing, selecting and scrolling windows belongs to the field of personal customizations.
If the representation of windows and the possible operations on them are displayed as a common view for all collaborators in one application, resizing, minmizing, maximizing, selecting, scrolling and dragging the documents may lead to distraction for other users, when one of then tries.
With the rise of the desktop metaphor and the disappearence of tiling windows, the possibility to resize, minmize, maximize, scroll, select and drag windows has become a standard feature among all modern operating systems. Windows may comprise other windows; the including window is called `toplevel window', included windows `owned windows'. The representation on a screen of one user of a collaborative WYSIWIS-environment, in which multiple users work, is a toplevel window without `ower' and multiple documents, which are opened at the same time in that environment, are shown in owned windows. Like the toplevel window, the owned windows can be resized, minmized, maximized, selected and dragged, too.
If all users share the same look, operations on the toplevel window and the owned windows are also displayed to all collaborators. These `shared' adjustments may lead to distraction, as the windows appearence changes on the screen of one user, even if he has not been engaged in adjusting it. Another problem is the possibility to select one owned window as current document to be worked on: If that window is the same for all collaborators and the selection of another owned window as chosen one affects all, the current document may change for a user even if he did not select another one. In a wordprocessing application occurs the situation, when one user types without looking at the screen and another user changes the current document at the same time. In that case, the first user would type in an owned window he did not intend to work on. Frustration and uncertainty are the consequences. Moreover the correction of such a mistake may lead to further mistakes. In strikt WYSIWIS all users share one look, wherefore in such environments this problem arises
The application `CoWord' offers a button to switch between single- and multi-mode view. The first view enables relaxed WYSIWIS, the second one strikt WYSIWIS and thus with the first view a user is able to change the windows as he likes.
Separate the views for all users and let every user have his own currently selected owned window inside a toplevel window. The customization of a window should only be displayed on the screen of the user, who performed that adjustment.
Window adjust is connected to .
Claas Digmayer, RWTH Aachen (Claas Digmayer@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).