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Romero, N., McEwan, G. and Greenberg, S. (2007)
A Field Study of Community Bar: (Mis)-matches between Theory and Practice. In Proc ACM Group 2007. (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA), ACM Press, pages 89-98, November 4-7.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).
Earlier version: Report 2006-826-19, March.
Additional materials: presentation.
DOI: 10.1145/1316624.1316638
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Abstract.
Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CB’s design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted an in-depth field study of a group’s on-going use of Community Bar over several weeks. We use results obtained from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by our theoretical design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation. As a critique, this reflection is an important iterative step in considering how CB should be redesigned, and serves as a cautionary tale of the difficulty of translating theoretical nuances into practice.
Keywords: Locales, casual interaction, distributed groupware.