Privacy and Interruptions in Team Awareness Systems

Several evaluations of team awareness systems showed, that interruptions and privacy violations during usage often lead to the rejection of the system by users. Most authors argue that this rejection is due to a fundamental dual trade-off between sending awareness information and privacy, and between receiving awareness information and disruption or resource consumption. While the assumption of a fundamental trade-off is widely accepted in state-of-the-art research, this paper disputes the predominant hypothesis. Instead, it is argued, that the trade-off is not of fundamental nature, but caused by neglecting elementary aspects in the design process. In order to verify this line of argument, a novel interface concept for mediating socio-emotional awareness information is presented. To verify the validity of the conceptual approach, several evaluations were conducted. The evaluations verified the approach of this paper and showed, that a cautious interface design can enhance user privacy in multi-user awareness systems and minimize disruptive effects on primary tasks, without reducing awareness mediation and usability.