Class 15, Reading 1

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Reading

• Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers
• Grudin

Outline

• Primarily Off-the-Shelf Products
• IS in Organizations: A Contrast to Product Development
• New Problems
• A Disparity: Work vs. Benefit
• Critical Mass and Prisoner’s Dilemma Problems
• Social, Political, and Motivational Factors
• Exception Handling in Workgroups
• Designing for Infrequently Used Features
• The Difficulty of Evaluation
• The Breakdown of Intuitive Decision Making
• Manage Acceptance: A New Challenge
• Email and Other Successes
• Shifting to a Work Perspective

Notes

• Eight challenges for groupware developers
• 1. Disparity in work and benefit.
• Groupware applications often require additional work from individuals who do not perceive a direct benefit from the use of the application.
• 2. Critical mass and Prisoner's dilemma problems.
• Groupware may not enlist the "critical mass" of users required to be useful, or can fail because it is never to any one's individual advantage to use it.
• 3. Disruption of social processes.
• Groupware can lead to activity that violates social taboos, threatens existing political structures, or otherwise demotivates users crucial to its success.
• 4. Exception handling.
• Groupware may not accommodate the wide range of exception handling and improvisation that characterizes much group activity.
• 5. Unobtrusive accessibility.
• Features that support group processes are used relatively infrequently, requiring unobtrusive accessibility and integration with more heavily used features.
• 6. Difficulty of evaluation.
• The almost insurmountable obstacles to meaningful, generalizable analysis and evaluation of groupware prevent us from learning from experience.
• 7. Failure of intuition.
• Intuitions in product development environments are especially poor for multiuser applications, resulting in bad management decisions and an error-prone design process.
• 8. The adoption process.
• Groupware requires more careful implementation (introduction) in the workplace than product developers have confronted.

Comments

• This paper was written in 1994, but the challenges mentioned in this paper still seem really relevant to developing groupware today.
• I find it interesting how Lotus Notes is occasionally mentioned as an example.  I haven't really heard it mentioned often since the 1990s, and nowadays hear it being used in historical terms, whether or not it's still being used.
• Google has a web page set up to convince people to switch from Lotus Notes to Google Apps.