(2022-07-22) Martin Collaborating With The Invisible

Jess Martin: Collaborating with the invisible. Why do collaboration experiences in applications feel so frustrating?

Imagine for a moment you're playing a board game with someone, in the real world. You sit down across from them and the game is laid out on a table in front of you. As you play together, casual observation of your opponent gives you a tremendous amount of information. You can tell from following their eyes what part of the board their focusing on.

We have a term for this: body language. Our physical bodies communicate

we have decades worth of experience and social norms about how to act constructively in those spaces

Unfortunately, collaborative experiences in software have shed many of those affordances and social cues.

imagine again playing a board game in the real world, but this time you are playing with someone who is invisible

Let's consider a couple of applications that tend to have multiple users collaborating in real time, and show some of the confusing interactions that can result when the environment fails to communicate effectively.

Invisible collaborators and your Kanban board

Trello: Users can drag cards between lists, reorder cards within lists, edit the content of cards, add new cards, delete cards. Importantly, Trello allows multiple users to view and edit the same board simultaneously.

• Who is looking at the board right now?
• What are they looking at? Are they looking at a specific card?
• What are people editing?
• What card is someone looking at in a long list?
• What cards are being dragged right now?

Augmenting the UI with presence and intention

Is anyone editing or viewing the card I'm about to archive or delete?

How could we make this better? Core design ideas:
"reveal intention"
presence and/or location

Ideas

• Sharing cursors is just a start
• Google Docs shows presence indicators - greyed out when inactive
• *animate in-progress work
• reveal what changed