1. Improved Awareness Systems in
Unified Communications
Software
William Kennedy
0726885

2. Contents
• Introduction
• Initial Research
• First Site Visit
• Persona Generation
• Initial design phase
• Second design phase
• Second Site Visit

3. Introduction

4. General Information
• Overall exploration of awareness technologies within unified
communications.
• Methods through which these systems can be improved.
• Unified Communications (or UC) Clients are not a single product,
"but rather a solution made up of a variety of communication tools
and components" Pleasant (2008)
• Core to most UC clients:
• Audio
• Video
• Text
• Presence Tech
• Examples include Skype, Google Talk, Microsoft Lync, CUPC (Cisco
Unified Personal Communicator) and now even Facebook.

5. A note on "Presence"
• Presence is a common industry term, used by Skype, Cisco,
Microsoft et al to describe what would by known to many,
academically, as awareness technologies within Unified
Communications. (Emacs-Jabber Project, 2011)
• "Presence services, in particular, are expanding to enable the
aggregation and publication of presence and location
information from and to multiple sources. This enhanced
functionality is sometimes called "rich presence"." - Elliot
and Blood (2011)

6. Motivating Factors
• Work at Cisco Galway
• Cisco Jabber UI Design
• Problems with the Presence Model
o Are they busy?
o Are they working from home?
• Saunders (2006) describes the Skype presence model as a "broken
idea", going on to explain that it "tells you nothing about the
person using the PC at the other end".
• The author at the blog 'Steve's Tech Journal' (2006) goes so far as
to say that "presence no longer has meaning" due to the problem
of people setting their status to 'Available' at all times even when
they are too busy to talk.

7. Objectives
• To gain an understanding of current literature in regard to
presence and awareness models.
• To gain a deep understanding of the needs of real world
users in regard to presence in unified communications.
• To design a more useful model of presence for unified
communications.
• To create an Adobe Flash based prototype which will
accurately and easily convey this improved presence model.

8. Design Assumptions
• Good awareness is peripheral in that it does not require the
users attention or focus in order to be effective.
• Schmidt (2002) shows that users are capable of taking
peripheral information use this to create useful meaning
effortlessly.
• Awareness information must be useful outside of a
traditional desk based environment.
• Even people who consider themselves as ‘desk workers’
actually spend less than 50% of their working time at a desk
(Bjerrum and Bodker, 2003).

9. Design Assumptions
• It is important for geographically removed workers to be able
to communicate informally, spontaneously, and to feel
comfortable in doing so. (Bly et al, 1993)
• While current awareness technologies allow for informality
and spontaneity, they fail to encourage it by giving none of
the social cues we would get by walking through any office.
E.g. Mood of other workers, how busy they are and the
feeling of a ‘shared culture’ (Dourish and Bly, 1992)

10. Initial Research

11. Literature Review
There are a number of core design issues presented within the
literature for producing a coherent, useful and usable system
of awareness. These are:
• Social Awareness
• Translucence
• Serendipity
• Geographical Dispersion

12. Social Awareness and Translucence
• Bardram and Hansen (2010), citing Schmist (2002) and numerous others,
argue that social awareness "fosters efficient coordination and
collaborating".
• Social awareness helps to reduce the amount of interruption and
disturbance which occurs when people are engaged in cooperative work.
Bardram and Hansen (2010)
• Bardrem and Hansen define four key areas in which contextual workplace
awareness can be fostered:
o Social
o Temporal
o Spatial
o Activity
• They call these the "'who', 'when', 'where' and 'what' in a shared work
environment."

13. Geographical Dispersion
• Maintenance of "mutual knowledge" (Crampton, 2001)
is one of the main problems for geographically dispersed
groups who wish to communicate.
• As humans we give on another strong nonverbal cues
that show that we are listening and understand one
another (Hogan and Stubbs, 2003). Distances destroy
our ability to adequately do so.
• Distance may cause us to make incorrect assumptions
about dispersed team mates, and Crampton advises that
this must be avoided.

14. Serendipity
• Kraut et al (1990) claim that there are four main types of
interpersonal interactions.
• They define these as:
o Scheduled interactions
o Intended interactions
o Opportunistic interactions
o Spontaneous interactions.
• While it is obviously important to design for all of these while
designing a communications system, it is spontaneous
interactions which are of particular interest when we speak
of designing an awareness system.

15. Software Research
• Elliot & Blood (2011) identify a number of existing integrated
unified communications suites including:
o Alcatel-Lucent (OpenTouch Communication Suite)
o Avaya (Aura)
o Cisco (CUPC, Jabber, WebEx Connect)
o Digium (Switchvox)
o Huawei (SoftCo)
o IBM (UC2)
o Microsoft (Lync, Skype)
o Mittel (MAS)
o NEC (Univerge Sphericall)
o Siemens (OpenScape UC)

16. First Site Visit

17. Preparation
• Cisco Galway were contacted as it fulfilled the criteria
of:
o Being a large Enterprise
o Being a consumate user of UC software
o Being able to provide a broad variety of users
o Being open to research visits
• Cisco Galway are also the developers of the Cisco Jabber
client and I felt this would provide valuable insight.
• Cisco were particularly open to me visiting the site due
to my prior experience in working there.

18. Preparation
• Documents prepared:
o E-mail survey
o Interview Recruitment E-mail
o Research questionnaire
o Declaration of Informed Consent
o Information Sheet
• Equipment:
o Handheld Recorder
o Notepad and Paper

20. Site Visit
• Organized with Mark Congiusta, User Experience
Manager at the Cisco Galway site.
• Took place on October 27th 2011 from 10am to 3pm.
• Met and interviewed seven members of the Cisco
Jabber team, including designers, engineers, qa and
management.
• Involved a semi-structured interview and discussion of
issues in UC including Geographical Dispersion, Mood
and Awareness.

21. Data Analysis
• Interviews were transcribed manually.
• In line with Saffer (2010) I made the data physical by
highlighting key and repeating terms in the
transcript and transferring them to post-it notes.
• I then combined, clustered, juxtaposed and named
the resulting clusters to produce new and
meaningful insights. (Saffer, 2010)
• Arranged core terms and important quotes into a
spider diagram.

25. Findings
• Users are unsure of the usefulness of sharing their mood
with their workmates.
• Some also showed a level of discomfort in sharing this level
of personal information with their workmates.
• Many users would be dishonest in sharing their mood with
workmates, and would prefer to show themselves as always
in a good mood, or to put on a "brave face".
• There is a pressure to be 'Available despite how busy they
may be.
• Users feel that emoticons are an extremely effective method
for sharing emotion through text, and would be happy and
comfortable to use them.

26. Findings
• Users feel that their level of activity, or how busy they are, is far
more important to convey than what mood they are in.
• Rennecker (2005) describes this as the "what I need to know to do
my job" ethos.
• Users would be extremely interested in being able to show
different status messages to different groups of people, for
example showing a different status message to teammates than
other work colleagues.
• One users describes this as "show[ing] different people different
faces".
• Many feel that this would be in keeping with how they currently
use 'groups' in their unified communication client.

27. Findings
• Many users use their co-workers presence indicators as a method
•
of knowing if that person is in the office or at their desk.
While many would like to know where their coworkers are, they
would also be uncomfortable with sharing this information
themselves. A sliding level of accuracy was suggested by a number
•
of users.
Users would like to be able to specify their preferred method of
being contacted, for example "IM only", "Phone only" or "Video
•
Preferred".
Physical distance are not a huge factor in being able to contact
someone, however time differences are.

28. Persona Generation

29. Creating Personas
• The personas are generic users of unified
communications within a corporate
environment as these are the primary users
for whom I am designing.
• The scenarios are based on scenarios
mentioned during the interviews conducted
at the Galway site, as well as my own
experiences with using unified
communications in that environment.

30. Personas
Robert: Jeremy: Amanda:
• 35 Years Old • 30 Year old • 24 Year old
• Mid-Level Manager • Designer • Software
• 10 team members • Works with many Engineer
• Managers teams including • Many managers
geographically Roberts • Member of
•
dispersed
• Based in Ireland, Roberts team
Team can work from
home
but largely works • Uses UC for work
• Uses UC for work
with American
teams.
and social life
mostly.

31. Initial Design Phase

33. Sketching

38. Second Design Phase

50. Second Site Visit

51. Preparation
• Cisco Galway agreed to a second visit for the
purpose of testing my Flash UI prototype.
• Testing was pushed back for various reasons,
including time constraints.
• Eventually took place on March 21st.

52. Site Visit
• Took place March 21st
• Asked 6 people to complete a guided
walkthrough of the prototype
• Users were asked to run through a set of
predefined tasks on the prototype and "think
aloud" as they did so.
• This interaction was guided by myself, and
recorded using both video and audio.

53. Preliminary Findings
• Users were concerned as to whether people
affected by colour-blindness would be able to
use the application.
• Users found it difficult disliked the concept of
averaging the presence of a group of people.
People are either available individually or not.
• Users in general found the user interface clean
and easy to navigate.

54. Preliminary Findings
• Some users found the grey text difficult to read
on some backgrounds.
• Users were concerned that they might not always
recognise a user by their profile picture alone.
• Users found the menu system and call transfer
system relatively straightforward.
• Some confusion arose due to a flaw in the
prototype to do with MouseOver events.

55. Future Directions
• Scalability
o Search
o Large numbers of users
o Visibility
• Mobile
o Apps
o GPS
• Platform Independence
o PC
o Mac
o Linux
• Social Media Integration
o Facebook

56. Questions?

57. References
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59. References
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