All computer systems, single user or multi-user, interact with the work-groups
and organizations in which they are used.
- We need to understand normal human-human communication:
- face-to-face communication involves eyes, face and body
- conversation can be analyzed to establish its detailed structure.
- This can then be applied to text-based conversation, which has:
but is more easily reviewed.
- reduced feedback for confirmation
- less context to disambiguate utterances
- slower pace of interaction
- Group working is more complex than that of a single person:
- it is influenced by the physical environment
- experiments are more difficult to control and record
- field studies must take into account the social situation.