katiemccurdy.com

Challenge

Finding 1: Groove meetings had fewer breaks and were more formal than in-person meetings.

The above graph shows a face-to-face meeting; each break from the top line represents informal activity (1/2 way point) or break in meeting (baseline). The number of breaks and informal activity is much higher than the below representation of a Groove meeting for the same group.


The groups's Groove meeting was much
more formal and had far fewer breaks.

Finding 5: Groove chat meetings gave a voice to marginalized team members and allowed for more egalitarian participation.


One member who was quiet in face-to-face meetings got attention by using loud fonts during the Groove chat.

For our Computer Supported Cooperative Work course, our group chose to evaluate Microsoft Groove's capacity to serve as a student group meeting tool.

Research Questions

• How do student groups manage and plan in-person meetings?
• How do they manage meetings using Microsoft Groove?
• What are the differences between in-person meetings and meetings held in Groove?
• How effective is Groove as a student group meeting tool?

Methods

• Contextual Inquiry
• Personas
• Scenarios
• Comparative Evaluation
• 6 Ethnographic Studies (2 student project groups)
• Pre- and Post-test questionnaires
• Debriefing Sessions
• Data Interpretation
• Recommendations

Brief Process Description

To gauge Groove's effectiveness, we scheduled a series of observations with two student groups; we first observed the groups during a typical in-person meeting, and then we observed them during two discloated meetings held using Microsoft Groove. We administered a series of interviews and surveys to gather more feedback on how Groove functioned. We also evaluted Groove by completing a competitive analysis along with user personas, scenarios, and a 'groupsona.' Upon completion of our observations, we worked as a team to crystallize our observations into findings. We then brainstormed design enhancements, and wrote up our final report.

Findings

• Finding 1: Groove meetings had fewer breaks and were more formal than in-person meetings.
• Finding 2: Groove meetings were less productive than face-to-face meetings.
• Finding 3: Lack of awareness of other team members' activities contributed to Groove meetings' inefficiency.
• Finding 4: Groove altered team decision dynamics.
• Finding 5: Groove chat meetings gave a voice to marginalized team members and allowed for more egalitarian participation.
• Finding 6: Participants preferred not to use Groove’s meeting planning tool.
• Finding 7: Groove features are good tools for setting user permissions, but they did not quite serve for meeting purposes.
• Finding 8: Groove's tools did not allow users to efficiently share rich media.
• Finding 9: Teams found value in Groove's sketchpad and file management tools.
• Finding 10: Groove’s workspace persistence is essential for long-term work .

My Role

I participated in all aspects of the process, including observing users, designing surveys, creating personas, and crystallizing findings. In addition I served as project manager, main writer and editor, and findings presenter.

Outcome

Although our findings related to team meetings held in Groove were not what we had expected, we found some interesting social nuances related to conducting meetings online instead of in-person. Our professors were very pleased with the thought we put into our final report (PDF - 4.2 MB).