Browsing by Author "Brown, Judith M."

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    Complex activities in an operations center: a case study and model for engineering interaction
    (ACM, 2013) Brown, Judith M.; Greenspan, Steven L.; Biddle, Robert L.
    Data operations and command centers are crucial for managing today's Internet-based economy. Despite advances in automation, the challenges placed on operations professionals continue to increase as they work individually or in teams to repair or proactively avoid service disruptions. Although there have been a few studies of collaborative work in military supervisory control centers, due to the sensitive nature of work in operating centers, there have been few studies on the activities that take place in commercial data centers. In this case study of a large, complex data operations and control center, activity theory is used to guide and interpret observations of individual and collaborative work. This resulted in a model of data operations activities, and the identification of tensions that arise within and between these activities. This model is of value to interaction engineers in the first phase of a user-centered engineering methodology. Using this model, we provide some recommendations for reducing some of the tensions we found, and discuss significant opportunities and challenges in this new domain for the HCI community.
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    Interactional identity: designers and developers making joint work meaningful and effective
    (ACM, 2012) Brown, Judith M.; Lindgaard, Gitte; Biddle, Robert
    We studied collaborating interface designers and software developers engaged in multidisciplinary software creation work. Twenty-one designers and developers in 8 organizations were interviewed to understand how each specialist viewed team interactions. We also shadowed most participants as they worked on novel software projects with user interface design challenges. A grounded theory analysis of interview transcripts showed that designers and developers construct unique identities in the process of collaborating that provide meaning to their artefact-mediated interactions, and that help them to effectively accomplish the work of creating novel software. Our model of interactional identities specifies a number of aspects of joint project work in which an interactional identity is expressed. We suggest these identities are constructed to bridge a gap between how designers and developers were taught to enact their roles and the demands of project-specific work.
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    Joint implicit alignment work of interaction designers and software developers
    (ACM, 2012) Brown, Judith M.; Lindgaard, Gitte; Biddle, Robert
    Collaboration is an important aspect of software creation work. In field studies of 8 teams in the early stages of novel project work at 8 organizations we focused on understanding collaborative work from the perspective of both the interaction designer and the developer. We found designer-developer collaborations, often occurring in the context of team collaborations, were extensive. While some collaborations were directed towards explicit alignment work, such as prioritizing tasks, we have studied implicit alignment work, which constitutes a larger part of the overall alignment work. The form of this work varied in some respects, but in general designer-developer interactions directed towards implicit alignment were remarkably similar. Our model shows how implicit alignment work is jointly achieved; we derived it from an extensive analysis of videos of 13 collaborative events, and verified it with our observation notes and interviews. The model is applicable to a wide variety of software creation settings, including agile and non-agile teams. Our analysis shows the implications of our observations of implicit alignment work, and we conclude organizations should take practical steps to support it, as is frequently done for explicit alignment work.