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Designing usable real-time, distributed collaboration tools is a complex but important task. Workspace awareness can potentially help in making real-time, distributed collaboration tools more usable through a communication of who is in the shared workspace and what they are doing. We present qualitative evaluations of the workspace awareness features of a gesture-based diagramming tool, Distributed Knight, that supports real-time, distributed collaboration. These studies suggest that using simple, non-intrusive awareness means results in fewer breakdowns, more symmetric collaboration patterns, better coordination, and higher perceived usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes experience obtained through a joint project between a university research group and a shipping company in developing a prototype for a global customer service system. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping, but succeeded in developing a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. A major reason for the success of the project is due to an experimental and multiperspective approach to designing for practice. Some of the lessons to be learned for object-orientation are (1) analysis is more than finding nouns and verbs, (2) design is more than filling in details in the object-oriented analysis model, and (3) implementation is more than translating design models into code. Implications for system development in general and objectorientation in particular consist in the preliminary respecification of the classical working order: analysis — design — implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]