ISSUES AND EXPERIENCES DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING TWO GROUP DRAWING TOOLS
Date
1991-07-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Groupware designers are now developing multi-user equivalents of popular
paint and draw applications. Their job is not an easy one. First, human
factors issues peculiar to group interaction appear that, if ignored,
seriously limit the usability of the group tool. Second, implementation
is fraught with considerable hurdles. In particular, contemporary window
systems and their user interface toolkits actually inhibit implementation
efforts by failing to provide adequate building blocks for constructing
group interface primitives and by not supplying an adequate architectural
infrastructure.
This paper describes the issues and experiences we have met and handled in
the design of two systems supporting remote real time group interaction:
\fIGroupSketch\fR, a multi-user sketchpad; and \fIGroupDraw\fR, an object-based
multi-user draw package. On the human factors side, we summarize empirically-
derived design principles that we believe are critical to building useful and
usable collaborative drawing tools. On the implementation side, we describe
our experiences with replicated versus centralized architectures, schemes for
participant registration, multiple cursors, network requirements, and the
structure of the drawing primitives.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science