An Eye For Design (2018)

[amoralesg001]

This article An Eye For Design .pdf reveals a new form of technology that could enhance productivity and collaboration in remote settings. This new tool uses gaze visualization, which enables people in a remote environments to gain more visual cues on where a remote collaborator is looking/focusing their attention on within the computer screen.

While this form of technology is relatively new and still being researched, I see huge potential within distributed paired programmers -- within both work and academic fields (students). As Covid-19 has challenged how we adapt to work settings, I think gaze visualization could be an approach within the future for remote students, to get help on computer science labs (or any lab course for that matter). Additionally, one of the challenges with remote pair programming, is the difficulty for programmers to describe where they are facing issues in the code to their remote partner. The article states more about this: "Researchers designed an unobtrusive gaze visualization for pair programmers that illustrate where a partner is looking as a rectangle in the right margin of the document... results show that the subtle design improved coordination without any of the distracting characteristics (e.g., visual occlusion) shown in previous studies. ” So, technology like these, are looking at ways to re-create those visual cues that are lost when working remotely. Which, in turn, could help productivity and collaboration with distributed members. However, it is also important to see when these technologies are beneficial, and when they only cause more distractions.

Results showed that the design of gaze visualization played a critical role to support collaboration. Also, the types of tasks and how intentional the tools were used impacted attention. Some of the limits towards these results, were that these tasks were only done through dyadic collaboration. It would be interesting to see how this study is reflected towards group collaboration.

I also found a YouTube video from the author of this study, which goes into more depth on her findings and future work. This study was eye opening to me, because it looked at creative ways people, like this author, find ways to mitigate challenges of remote collaboration -- such as the loss of visual cues. It makes me wonder what other ways technology can be used to help improve sensory cues -- such as hearing, touch, pointing, smell, laughing, and many other cues in a remote setting. I also think this is related to immersive technologies since it creates more awareness in the sense that distributed members can feel more of a "together" feeling when collaborating. @elaineraybourn , I think you would find this article interesting and would be interested to talk more about this with you.

[amoralesg001]

This form of technology, could also help promote more inclusiveness and resources towards communities who do not have professionals that can help them f2f. Remote interactions and gaze visualizations could give students one-on-one help and learning opportunities when the student does not understand a certain concept or problem.

[elaineraybourn]

@amoralesg001 In principle this approach shows promise, especially for tutoring, and collaborative (pair) work. I wonder how this approach would scale to three, four, or more participants?

[amoralesg001]

@elaineraybourn It's Interesting to see some new insights I have gotten while returning back to school and doing hybrid classes. This mod - A class (Discrete Mathematics) that I am currently in also has a programming lab incorporated into it. To get help from a professor, we need to be on zoom and ask for help. From there, the host puts the professor and student in a break-out room to get additional help on a programming problem. My personal experience and the experiences I have heard from other peers that I have spoken to say that It becomes extremely difficult to direct the professor onto where they are having troubles. Or, if the professor has a solution, it becomes difficult for the student to understand which line the error is occurring without the professor being physically there. So, in the sense of tutoring and classwork I think these forms of technologies would be extremely helpful. I am not sure how it would work with a group of people, but I think that would be really interesting to experiment on ! I think a group of people using gaze visualizations would cause more distractions.

[elaineraybourn]

@amoralesg001 interesting approach being used. I wonder what is gained beyond seeing your professor's cursor in the code? Maybe a collaborative environment with picture in picture? I did research years ago on single display groupware for kids. We found that it enhanced shoulder to shoulder collaboration. I wonder what the impact is here. it would be easy to study.