Investigating Notifications and Awareness for Multi-user Multi-touch Tabletop Displays

Notifications seek to guide people's attention toward timely, relevant, and important tasks and interactions. This work considers situations in which multiple people are sharing a single large display, with collaborative notifications targeted at increasing team awareness of the joint goals, activities, and interactions. Notifications in recent studies show promise in enhancing awareness of the actions of co-located collaborators, but lacking is critical knowledge to guide the evaluation of the benefits and costs of collaborative activities. This paper presents a framework for notifications in a multi-user multi-touch context. The framework is explored for a card-sorting task performed by two people (a participant and a scripted confederate) on a shared tabletop display. Notifications highlight actions performed by each participant to understand changes in social, action, and activity awareness. Our study investigates individual work, social norms and team performance as three co-located factors that are affected by incorporating notifications.