Collaborative Work Tasks

School of Geography, University of Leeds

Principal Investigator:

Professor CM Leigh

Dates:

1st March 2000 – 28th February 2003

Grant:

EPSRC

Summary:

The aim of the proposed research is to provide a new approach to the model-based design of virtual working environments. The research will investigate models of collaborative tasks taking account of the social and contextual factors associated with collaborative work, and develop collaborative virtual working environments to support those tasks. The results of this will provide the theoretical foundation for the research into a hierarchical object scripting language and environment. Thus providing the models and tools to support the design of virtual working environments from good human factors and software principles. The research has three objectives:

• To revise and extend TKS to model the social and cognitive processes involved in collaborative tasks; to develop principles of collaboration and to develop the UI-VWE modelling methodology to create virtual working environments.
• To design and build an experimental model- based VWE architecture that incorporates the UI-VWE models based on UI-VWE modelling methodology from 1.
• To evaluate the principles, models and design environment, and the ability to effectively use these to create good quality model-based VWEs, using a series of realistic case studies, and task scenarios.

The outcome of the research will improve the ability of designers to efficiently create usable systems with improved usability performance, together with the development of more generally applicable TKS models. Another outcome will be an improved understanding of model-based architectures, and in particular principles for the design of user interfaces to VWEs, using an object-oriented, model-based approach.