PI: Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

Abstract

Today’s markets are global, development teams are spread all over the globe, and meetings usually take place over telephone or video connections. Collaborative tools face additional problems because remote working modes develop from information sharing sessions to creative sessions, with people actually creating information rather than just updating each other. Supporting design thinking teams with appropriate tools is especially challenging. We will observe how teams work together over distances while adopting design thinking methods, and which tools they are using for their communication.  We started with a team of 25 employees within a software company, which now developed to about 300 users in the system. We continuously observe their usage behavior based on automatically recorded sessions and take out interviews. Our research focus is on their actual pain points during their work and how they intuitively get around these problems. This leads to further implications on the development of the Tele-Board software suite and general guidelines to the development of tools for distributed settings.

Additionally, we are developing an enhanced version of the history browser within the Tele-Board system which allows for browsing a team’s past activity, including the highlighting of important points as well as seeing the recorded video of the remote colleagues. A user study will be conducted in order to see, how people can really understand why certain decisions were made during the design process. To achieve remote and asynchronous work traceability is a vital part of multi-time-zone work settings.