Group awareness has become important in improving the usability of real-time, distributed, collaborative writing systems. However, the current set of implemented awareness mechanisms is insufficient in providing extensive and comprehensive awareness in collaborative authoring. Certainly, current mechanisms, such as telepointers and multi-user scrollbars, have contributed greatly in providing awareness support in collaborative writing. Yet, given the shortcomings of these mechanisms and the difficulty in providing rich interaction found in face-to-face collaboration, much more support needs to be provided for group awareness during authoring. This research extends the pool of all known awareness mechanisms (including those that have been discovered before but have yet to be implemented).This research discovered several awareness mechanisms not found and reported elsewhere, through conducting usability experiments with a real-time cooperative editor. This paper covers three of the mechanisms---Task Allocation Tree, User Action List and User-based History Tracking---discovered from the experiments. The paper also provides quantitative results supporting implementation of such mechanisms.
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