with Blake Reary

Designing for Collaboration

About Me

@blakereary

What we’ll cover

• Overview of collaboration

• Common heuristics for collaborative software

• Apply heuristics to modern tools

• An exercise at the end

What is Collaboration?

Two or more people bringing a unique perspective to a problem, reaching consensus, and creating an

artifact that is greater than the sum of its parts.

1+1=3

Collaboration IRL

Many Elements of Collaboration

Products

• Collaboration around sales cycle

• Automatic sharing of emails to collaborators

• Smart features like “Follow-ups”

• Analytics platform for data teams

• Analysts work in SQL, create re-usable reports

• Built in visualizations as well as support for D3 & others

Some Questions

What is the goal of the collaboration?

Is collaboration synchronous or asynchronous?

What phase of collaboration do you support?

8 Heuristics

Connection

Identification

Ownership

Transmission

Notification

Election

Synchronization

Common Ground Preservation

Who & What When & How Why

8 Heuristics for Collaboration

RelateIQ

Again!

Connection

Notification

Identification

Synchronization

Transmission

Ownership

Common Ground Preservation

Common Ground Preservation

Connection

Identification

Ownership

Transmission

Notification

Election

Synchronization

Common Ground Preservation

Who & What When & How Why

Mode

Ownership

Identification

Common Ground Preservation

Synchronization

Common Ground Preservation

Connection

Notification

Connection

Identification

Ownership

Transmission

Notification

Election

Synchronization

Common Ground Preservation

Who & What When & How Why

So now what?

Pitfalls

• Too many sources of truth

• Adoption

Thanks

References

Heuristics adapted from:

http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/labs/halab/pdfs/MITRE-Kirigin-Heuristic_Evaluation_Techniques_for_Collaborative_Software.pdf