Using Transcription and Replay in Analysis of Collaborative Applications

摘要

As organizations become more distributed enterprises, the use of collaborative applications as part of day-to-day activities becomes more prevalent. How to build collaborative applications so that they work as expected, both as the developer expects and the community of users expect, is a challenge that must be addressed in order for these applications to be adapted as part of organizational activities. In practice, assumptions made by the developer may not match the expectations of the users and may result in a collaborative application being used sub-optimally, at best, or abandoned altogether, at worst. This paper details a model for collecting a transcript of online collaboration. The transcript, as collected, contains sufficient information to recreate the precise state of the collaborative application at any given time, and, therefore, the collaborative activity can be recreated for analysis, using techniques such as ethnography.