Peek-At-You: An Awareness, Navigation, and View Sharing System for Remote Collaborative Content Creation

tl;dr: Mixed-focus collaboration in remote work is challenging, as it involves switching between individual and group tasks while staying aware of others' activities. This paper presents Peek-at-You, a system that integrates collaboration and communication software to provide collaborative features such as conversational position indicators, speaker's view peeking, and view pushing. The evaluation of these features demonstrates their effectiveness in supporting awareness, understanding, and transitions between working states.

Abstract

Remote work plays a critical and growing role in modern workplaces. A particular challenge for remote workers is mixed-focus collaboration, which involves frequent switching between individual and group tasks while maintaining awareness of others’ activities. Mixed focus collaboration is important in content creation as it can benefit from the greater perspective, larger skill set, and reduced bias of a group, but this work is difficult to do remotely because existing systems only provide information about collaborators passively or through cumbersome interactions. In this paper, we present Peek-at-You, a system of collaborative features leveraging integration between collaboration and communication software, including conversational position indicators, speaker’s view peeking, and view pushing. Our evaluation shows these features help support awareness, understanding, and working state transitions. Finally, we discuss adapting the features to manage distractions and support various work artifacts.