The importance of situation awareness in efficiency of distributed collaborative working

This paper overviews the work done jointly during the European ENHANCE Project by the Remote Collaborative Working Methods (COSITE) and Human Factors (HF) tasks. The aim of COSITE was to put in place effective methods for remote collaborative work. It is clear that the elaboration of these methods is tightly concerned with human factors aspects. A scenario based on a real-time distributed collaborative environment was used to analyze the situation awareness perceived by users. The findings permit to understand the communication process and to generate best practices for using communication media.