BASE LEGAL

This first study’s aim is to generate design guidelines and principles to support design and implementation of device ecologies. A specific focus on a narrow band of activities has been picked the study:

• The study focuses on the meetings themselves. The longitudinal aspects of collaborative tasks would fall within the remit of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) studies independently of the interaction design considerations specific to co-located collaborative device ecologies.

• The activities at the meetings can vary, so do tools. Rather than interfering in a business-specific aspect of the meetings, the study will focus on a number of tasks that would appear more mundane at a first glance but however from the data in Chapter 3, those surrounding issues are prevalent in most scenarios: content sharing, and to a lesser extent, screen sharing. A first step taken was to formalise the acts of content and screen sharing using flow-diagrams representing the different actors (people and machines) and their interconnection. For example, content sharing has been broken down into a number of user-level steps:

• User 1 locates a content to share on device 1 and initiates sharing • Device 1 sends a sharing request to device 2

• Device 2 informs user 2 of the request, user 2 accepts or declines • Device 2 informs device 1 and sharing proceeds or not

• When content has arrived on device 2 appropriate acknowledgements are displayed on devices.

The process above is aiming to be technology agnostic. In technical terms there would be a number of application and transport protocols dealing with the networking issues, however these are outside the scope this study. For the remainder of this thesis networking is considered a black-box.

The flow diagram on Figure 14 is an attempt to represent the steps described in the above bullet points.

Figure 14 Steps involved when sharing content

Figure 15 screen sharing data-flow diagram

Figure 15 illustrates describe the process of screen sharing. They do share a common base. To share content, it first has to be located. Both sharing content and screens include the issues of locating contents and devices. Sharing screens also involves locating other devices, as users need to choose a target screen or TV to perform the activity. There are more specific issues involved in screen sharing that can be looked at, but it doesn’t involve locating content. The study will

User Network Large screens BYOD Device Locate screens Select screen Share screen Locate screens Screen content Advertise service Advertise screens List of screens Screen content

therefore focus on the task of sharing content with a view to re-use some of its principles towards the actions involved in screen-sharing.

4.3 Methodology

The study consists of the qualitative analysis of focus group interviews; the methodology for analysis is a simplified approach informed by the stages of grounded theory analysis, similar to the previous study described in Chapter 3. The main aim of this methodology is to quickly generate concepts and ideas from the data that was collected. Once generated, the concepts can later be used as a baseline for further empirical work.

The steps taken for the study are the following:

• At first, the focus groups are interviewed together for a duration of 45 minutes. They are being shown different existing or hypothetical user interface examples focusing on the steps the study is aiming to help design. The interviews are captured on video media with an audio backup.

• Then, the interviews are transcribed in a written form, for analysis. The granularity of transcripts is quite low-level, keeping hesitations, interruptions or laughter in the text. However, non-relevant discussions are kept away, as well as parts of the text that are marked an inaudible during the transcription process.

Both groups interviewed are mature MSc students taking a Human-Computer Interaction module at university. Both groups were interviewed during a two-hour afternoon practical class. The first group consisted of four people: two male and two female participants. The second group consisted of three people: two male and one female participant. Two of those were not native English speakers but still highly proficient.

1. Introduction: the group is introduced to the researcher, the concept of collaborative device ecologies, the meeting journey, and the broad ideas of the research.

2. Consent: participants are asked to return signed consent forms.

3. Participants are being shown the mind map of the meeting journey and the researcher explains the broad ideas and concepts.

4. The participants are shown different screenshots of interfaces for content and device location and transfer on desktop and mobile platforms. A large majority of the screenshots are taken on Apple macOS or iOS operating systems; however, a lot of them represent generic desktop situations that can be easily replicable on Microsoft or Linux operating systems. Then they are asked the following questions as a conversation starter: What works for you? How do you find and identify content? How do you find and identify the device you are working on? (Appendix C)

5. Open comment section, supported by showing videos of two gesture-based applications: Air Link (Chen et al., 2014) and the now discontinued application Bump (Lieb, 2013).

6. The aim of the last act is to open the discussion on forms of interaction outside the classic desktop and mobile paradigms.

The first group’s recorded interview lasted 40 minutes, which generated a 4,600- word transcript. The second interview lasted 36 minutes and generated 3,200 words, giving a whole body of approximately 7,800 words.