Designing Ad-Hoc Cross Device Collaborations For Small Groups

The curation of historic documents is a difficult task as it requires to combine information and raw material from many different sources. Digital tools can support such a sensemaking task and group collaboration can help the discovery of knowledge. While most of people’s personal devices (such as phones, tablets and laptops) are connected to the internet, they are not aware of each other’s presence or relationship when in close proximity. Leveraging people’s personal devices and other devices in their surroundings provides an opportunity to support the curation of historic documents in ad hoc small group scenarios. I describe my motivation and a selection of related work, leading to requirements for such a system. I then state how I am planning to address these challenges and my current state of research, following two parallel tracks: building and testing technology as well as conducting observational studies and interviews to inform my designs

Designing for Cross-Device Interactions

Driven by technological advancements, we now own and operate an ever-growing number of digital devices, leading to an increased amount of digital data we produce, use, and maintain. However, while there is a substantial increase in computing power and availability of devices and data, many tasks we conduct with our devices are not well connected across multiple devices. We conduct our tasks sequentially instead of in parallel, while collaborative work across multiple devices is cumbersome to set up or simply not possible. To address these limitations, this thesis is concerned with cross-device computing. In particular it aims to conceptualise, prototype, and study interactions in cross-device computing. This thesis contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)—and more specifically to the area of cross-device computing—in three ways: first, this work conceptualises previous work through a taxonomy of cross-device computing resulting in an in-depth understanding of the field, that identifies underexplored research areas, enabling the transfer of key insights into the design of interaction techniques. Second, three case studies were conducted that show how cross-device interactions can support curation work as well as augment users’ existing devices for individual and collaborative work. These case studies incorporate novel interaction techniques for supporting cross-device work. Third, through studying cross-device interactions and group collaboration, this thesis provides insights into how researchers can understand and evaluate multi- and cross-device interactions for individual and collaborative work. We provide a visualization and querying tool that facilitates interaction analysis of spatial measures and video recordings to facilitate such evaluations of cross-device work. Overall, the work in this thesis advances the field of cross-device computing with its taxonomy guiding research directions, novel interaction techniques and case studies demonstrating cross-device interactions for curation, and insights into and tools for effective evaluation of cross-device systems