Exploring awareness related usability problems of collaborative software with a team usability testing approach

Since virtual teamwork became usual in everyday work, the need for collaborative software is growing. Collaborative software requires special usability testing techniques because of the team level usability problems, which cannot be measured with individual methods. Team usability testing approach makes an attempt to explore team level problems. The theoretical background of this method includes the mechanics of collaboration, which are basic actions which group members need to be able to do in order to use a shared workspace effectively. Team usability testing is an empirical usability evaluation method built on the mechanics of collaboration to explore team level usability problems of collaborative software. The method involves communication analysis, behavior analysis and analysis of post-experiment interviews. This method was applied in a laboratory experiment with 7 teams, 3 members per each. Team members had to collaborate and solve a common task using the same software. The main aim of this article is to introduce the details of team usability testing method. Besides, early group interview results of an experiment based on the real-life usage of this new method and the plan of the future analysis of the data will be discussed.