Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Stockholm University and KTH.

February 1992

Last update: 3 August 1996 by Jacob Palme E-mail: jpalme@dsv.su.se.

 

Part 3: Does system design matter

Does it matter how a computer conference system is designed, other than that a bad user interface may discourage people from using the system?

One way to answer this question is to look at the experience with existing systems, and see if the actual behaviour of the user differs with different system design. There do not exist very many studies to investigate the user behaviour in different systems. Some information is however available from a number of cases:

Writing personally addressed mail versus conference contributions

Studies on use of the Forum-Planet computer conferencing system have shown that new users of these systems tend to write mainly conference contributions, while experienced users write more personally addressed mail. This is peculiar, since experience with most other conference systems is the opposite: Beginners tend to write mostly interpersonal mail.

The explanation is however easy if one looks at the user interface of Forum-Planet. This user interface makes it much easier to write a conference contribution than to write a personally addressed message.

Multi-conference messages

Many group communication environments have ethical rules which strongly discourages the sending of the same contribution to more than one group. This is peculiar, since it might seem natural in many cases to send a contribution to more than one group, if the topic of the contribution overlaps the areas of both groups.

The explanation for this rule is however obvious. The systems which have these ethical rules are designed in such a way, that if a contribution is sent to more than one group, and a recipient is a member of both groups, then that recipient will see the contribution twice.

Interesting to note is that no requests for such ethical rules have appeared in the KOM family of conference systems (KOM, PortaCOM, SuperKOM) where the software is designed so that a user is not shown the same contribution as new more than once, even if it is sent to more than one conference.

Allowing the sender to check if his/her message has been read

Some message systems allow the sender to find out if and when his/her messages have been read by their recipients. The existence of such a facility is controversial, some people claim that it is an infringement of privacy. However, such critical view are often heard for mail systems with distribution lists, but very seldom for conference systems. The probable explanation is that because the conference systems allow the recipient more control of what to read or not to read than pure mail systems with distribution lists, the user to not feel the same need for protection of privacy in the conference systems as in the mail systems.

Controlling who may start conferences

In a conference system at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm many years ago, the administrators of the system decided that ordinary students (who were the main users of the system) should not be allowed to start conferences.

The effect of this was that the students instead discussed the topics they wanted in the conferences available, which meant that the discussion in the conferences often did not agree very well with the intended topic of the conference. This however, led to rather violent clashes between those who wanted to discuss the intended topic of the conference and nothing else, and those who wanted to discuss other issues.

Conclusion

The conclusion from this is that system design does influence user behaviour, often in peculiar and unintended ways. To some extent, however, users will try to circumvent bad systems design by finding ways of getting around the limitations.

The other parts.

References:

[1] Benford, S. and Palme, J.: Developing Standards for OSI Group Communication. Not yet accepted for publication.

[2] CCITT, Message Handling Systems: System Model - Service Elements, Recommendation X.400, 1988, (Also published as ISO International Standard 10021).

[3] Crocker, D.H.: Standard for the Format of Arpa Internet Text Messages. August 1982. Network Information Center RFC822, SRI, California, 1982.

[4] Hiltz, S.R., Johnson, K., Aronovitch, C. and Turoff, M.: Face-to face vs. computerized conferencing: A Controlled experiment, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, Research Report no 12.

[5] Hiltz, S.R. and Turoff, M.: Structuring Computer-mediated Communication Systems to avoid Information Overload. Communications of the ACM, July 1985, pp 680-689.

[6] Horton M.R., Adams R., Standard for the Interchange of USENET Messages, Network Information Center RFC 1036, SRI, California, 1987.

[7] International Organisation for Standardisation - Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection, ISO 7498, 1984.

[8] International Standards Organization: Group Communication functionality. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 18/WG 4 document N1144, January 1990.

[9] International Organisation for Standardisation - Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Specification of Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), ISO 8824, 1986.

[10] International Organisation for Standardisation - Information Processing Systems - Text communication - Remote operations (ROS), ISO 9072, 1988.

[11] Keehan, Michael T.: The Participate computer conferencing system. AFIPS Office Automation Conference, Los Angeles, February 1984.

[12] Palme, J: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Computer-Mediated Message Systems. In Information Processing 86, Proceedings of the World Computer Conference 1986 pp 1021-1023.

[13] Palme, J.: Experience with the use of the COM computer conference System. QZ UniversitetsData AB report C10166E, 1982, 1984.

[14] Palme, J. and Tholerus, T.: SuperKOM - Design considerations for a distributed, highly structured computer conferencing system. In Computer Communications, vol. 15, no. 8, october 1992 pp 509-518.

[15] Palme, J.: SuperKOM - a distributed computer conference system. Proceedings of the IFIP Symposium on Message Handling Systems and Application Layer Communication Protocols, Zürich, October 1990, North-Holland.

[16] Palme, J.: Data Base Structure in PortaCOM. Byte Magazine, December 1985.

[17] Postel, J.B.: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Network Information Center RFC821, SRI, California, 1982.

[18] Turoff, M.: Computer-mediated Communication requirements for group support. Journal of organizational computing, volume 1, number 1, 85-113, 1991.

[19] Vallee, Jaques: The Forum project - network conferencing and its future applications. Computer Networks, 1(1976) pp 39-52.

[20] Whitescarver, J. et al., A Network Environment for Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM `87 Workshop: Frontiers in Computer Communications Technology, ACM Press, 1988, 230-244.