Issues and experiences designing and implementing two group drawing tools

Greenberg, S., Roseman, M., Webster, D. and Bohnet, R. (1992)
Issues and experiences designing and implementing two group drawing tools. In Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Volume 4. (Kuwaii, Hawaii), IEEE Press, pages 138-150. Also as Report 1991-438-22, July. Reprinted in R. Baecker, ed. Readings in CSCW and Groupware, Morgan Kaufmann, 1992.

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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. This paper describes the issues and experiences we have met and handled in the design of two systems supporting remote real time group interaction: GroupSketch, a multi-user sketchpad; and GroupDraw, 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.

Bibtex entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { 1992-IssuesExperiences.HICS,
CLASS = { CONFARTICLE },
AUTHOR = { Greenberg, S. and Roseman, M. and Webster, D. and Bohnet, R. },
TITLE = { Issues and experiences designing and implementing two group drawing tools },
BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences },
PAGES = { 138-150 },
YEAR = { 1992 },
PUBLISHER = { IEEE Press },
ADDRESS = { Kuwaii, Hawaii },
VOLUME = { Volume 4 },
NOTE = { Also as Report 1991-438-22, July. Reprinted in R. Baecker, ed. Readings in CSCW and Groupware, Morgan Kaufmann, 1992 },
}