Browsing by Author "Romero, Natalia"

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    A Field Study of Community Bar: (Mis)-matches between Theory and Practice
    (2006-03-27) Romero, Natalia; McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, Saul
    Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CB s design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted an in-depth field study of a group s on-going use of Community Bar over several weeks. We use results obtained from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by our theoretical design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation. As a critique, this reflection is an important iterative step in considering how CB should be redesigned, and serves as a cautionary tale of the difficulty of translating theoretical nuances into practice.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Grounding Privacy in Mediated Communication
    (2011-04-01T16:41:31Z) Romero, Natalia; Markopoulos, Panos; Greenberg, Saul
    This paper addresses interpersonal privacy coordination in the context of mediated communication, emphasizing the dialectic and dynamic nature of privacy. We contribute the Privacy Grounding Model − built upon the Common Ground theory − that describes how connected individuals create and adapt privacy borders dynamically and in a collaborative process. We present the theoretical foundations of the model. We also show the applicability of the model, where we give evidence from two case studies that illustrate how it can describe privacy coordination among users of an instant messaging application and a desktop awareness system. More generally, we believe designers can use the Privacy Grounding Model to reflect on how their system supports or fails to support people’s lightweight privacy coordination mechanisms, and in particular how communicators within the system create and use privacy border representations as common ground. Finally we briefly consider the design of interactive and lightweight privacy grounding mechanisms.