NYNEX Portholes:Initial User Reactions and Redesign ImplicationsAlison Lee Andreas Girgensohn Kevin SchlueterNYNEX Science & Technology FX Palo Alto Laboratory Dept. of Computer Science500 Westchester Avenue 3400 Hillview Avenue University of TorontoWhite Plains, NY 10604 USA Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA Toronto, ON M5S 1A4 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] prevalence of audio and video options on computers,coupled with the promise of bandwidth, have many prog-nosticators predicting a revolution in human communica-tions. But what if the revolution materializes and no usersshow up? We were confronted with this question when webegan deploying and studying the use of a video-based,background awareness application within our organization.Repeatedly, new users raised strong concerns about self-pre-sentation, surveillance, privacy, video snapshots, and lack ofaudience cues. We describe how we addressed these con-cerns by evolving the application. As a consequence, we arealso redesigning the user interface to the application.KeywordsAwareness, audience, collaboration, design, glance, port-holes, privacy, reciprocity, surveillance, Web.INTRODUCTIONWe are at a juncture in technological development where thedecreasing cost of desktop audio/video hardware, the com-mercial availability of media space applications, and theease of linking people enable physically distributed organi-zations and individuals to pursue richer communicationoptions. These advances make it possible to examine the useof these media space technologies within a broader base ofusers. More importantly, they provide an opportunity tostudy and address the issues that limit the widespreadacceptance of such technologies. Poor acceptance of suchtechnologies can limit the research on and the potential fortechnology to facilitate the formation of virtual work com-munities. As well, if we are not aware of the barriers to useradoption, we risk building group tools that few will use.Over the last three years, our group has explored the use ofmedia spaces to improve communication and facilitate ashared understanding among physically distributed groupsin our organization. This effort includes creating a groupawareness tool to maintain group ties and to support oppor-tunities for communication and interaction. This tool,known as NYNEX Portholes, is a Web-based extension ofthe Xerox Polyscope and Portholes systems [3, 5]. Wechose this service because of the positive experiences atXerox with using it to facilitate and support awareness andcommunication among distributed work groups. We devel-oped and evolved NYNEX Portholes by closely involvingour users and proactively seeking their input at every stage.By developing Portholes as a Web application, it is easilyaccessible to distributed individuals through the Web.Several groups, inside and outside of NYNEX, are using thissystem. However, despite its availability, we have found thatgaining universal adoption by all group members or recruit-ing whole new groups remains difficult. We must addressrepeatedly the initial reactions to the system. These reac-tions center around the use of cameras and video images toprovide information for group and collaboration awareness.Understanding and addressing these reactions is critical tothe adoption of the system and to being able to assess thevalue of the technology.This paper presents the five user reactions that we haveencountered and our experiences with understanding andresolving them. We first describe the current state of Port-holes. Then we describe the methodology we used to deploythe system and to obtain user input for evolving the system.A profile of the various user groups that were exposed toand/or used the system is presented. This is followed by thepresentation of the five recurring user reactions, the issuesunderlying them, and the resolution approaches and theireffectiveness. Before concluding, we reflect on our experi-ences and discuss two additional contributions of our work,aside from our findings, which shed light on how video-based, background awareness tools should be deployed andhow to redesign the system to support a number of crucialbut missing properties for portholes-like awareness tools.NYNEX PORTHOLESNYNEX Portholes integrates and builds on past efforts todevelop a tool that allows distributed work groups to accessinformation related to general and peripheral awareness [2,3, 5, 6, 13, 15]. Such awareness tools have principally usedvideo and video images to inform people. They have largelycome in two flavors: portholes and glance [15]. Portholes-like tools provide an overview of a community through amatrix of video images. This peripheral or backgroundsense of group awareness is facilitated by periodic auto-matic updates of the video images. Glance-like tools pro-vide electronic analogues of users strolling down a hallwayand intentionally glancing into people’s offices. They differPermission to make digitial/ hard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are nomade or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission othe ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee.© 1997 ACM GROUP ‘97, Phoenix AZ USAGROUP’97, International Conference on Supporting Group Work, ACM, New York, 1997.from portholes-like awareness tools in that users mustexplicitly initiate brief reciprocal glances in order to obtainawareness information (i.e., active rather than passiveapproach).NYNEX Portholes (see Figure 1) shares many of the featuresof the original Xerox Portholes system [5] but differs inways related to the needs and requirements of our user base.Reasons for these differences and for the additional capabil-ities will be apparent when we discuss user reactions andour resolutions in the User Reactions section. In the remain-der of this section, we provide an overview of the system toestablish a context for the key capabilities of Portholes.These key capabilities include:1. disclosure of awareness information,2. membership in virtual groups,3. informal and spontaneous communication,4. image quality options,5. lookback — approximating reciprocity,6. ubiquitous access to Portholes, and7. remote sites in Portholes.Disclosure of