Successful collaboration depends on effective communication. Ongoing group
awareness facilitates communication by enabling workers to be more informed
about their collaborators, about their activities, and about the interpersonal
dependencies among people working together. In this paper we present MyUnity, a
new system that aids workers in building group awareness.
Cognitive Dimensions is a framework for analyzing human-computer interaction.
It is used for meta-analysis, that is, for talking about characteristics of
systems without getting bogged down in details of a particular implementation.
In this paper, I discuss some of the dimensions of this theory and how they can
be applied to analyze information seeking interfaces. The goal of this analysis
is to introduce a useful vocabulary that practitioners and researchers can use
to describe systems, and to guide interface design toward more usable and
useful systems