Foundations for the Design of Visualizations that Support Trust in Distributed Teams

We seek to provide design principles for software tools intended to support the development of trust in distributed teams. As such, we present a "design space" for such tools that consists of three elements: trust factors, collaborative traces, and visual representations. Trust factors are aspects of work shown in the research literature to influence one's perceived trustworthiness of their team members. Collaborative traces are representations of past and current work done by team members manipulating project artifacts. Collaborative traces provide information about a trust factor. Visual representations consist of a set of visual abstractions of the collaborative traces arranged in a layout that provides users with the ability to formulate accurate perceptions of their team members' trustworthiness with respect to a particular trust factor. Because the eventual goal of this research is to produce visual interfaces that support the development of trust, we apply elements from the design space to the design of three example visualizations. We conclude by assessing the value of the model and outlining future work.