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This study reports the second in a series of related studies of the ways in which small g roups work together , and the e f fec t s of var ious kinds of technology suppor t . In this study groups of three people worked for an hour and a half designing an Automated Post Off ice . Our previous work showed that people doing this task produced higher quality des igns when they were able to use a shared-edi tor to support their emerging design. This study compares the same kinds of groups now working at a distance, connected to each o ther both by this shared editor and either with high-qual i ty s tereo audio or the same audio plus highquality video. The video was arranged so that people made eye contact and spatial relations were preserved, allowing people to have a sense of who was doing what in a way similar to that in faceto-face work. Results showed that with video, work was as good in quality as that face-to face; with audio only, the quality of the work suffered a small but s ign i f i can t amount . W h e n work ing at a distance, however , g roups spent more t ime c lar i fying to each other and ta lk ing longer about how to m a n a g e their work. F u r t h e r m o r e , groups rated the audio-only condit ion as having a l o w e r d iscuss ion qual i ty , and repor ted more d i f f i cu l ty c o m m u n i c a t i n g Percep t ions su f f e r wi thout video, and work is accompl i shed in s l ight ly d i f fe ren t manner, but the quality of work suffers very little. K E Y W O R D S Group suppor t system, remote work, concurrent editing, small group behavior, desktop video. I N T R O D U C T I O N Meetings are a central component of collaborative work in organizat ions. They can range f rom formal meet ings that are schedu led in advance with a p re -def ined agenda to informal , ad hoc meetings where the members of a work group get together to work interactively on some problem on the spur of the momen t . Tradi t ional ly , all forms of what we think of as meetings took place face-to-face, in Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of ACM. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. CHI' 95, Denver, Colorado, USA © 1995 ACM 0-89791-694-8/95/0005...$3.50 David K. Meader Depanment of Management Information Systems Karl Eller Graduate School of Management 430 McClelland Hall University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 (602) 621 -3600 dmeader@ bpa.arizona.edu meeting rooms, commons areas, and lunchrooms. But as we ail know, groups no longer need to meet in the same location; new technologies are al lowing us to relax the constraint of co-locat ion. Modern te lecommunica t ions make available an interest ing array of opt ions such as te leconferences , video c o n f e r e n c e s , and synch ronous interactions over computer networks. These alternatives to face-to-face interactions have distinct properties, and have not, in any real sense, replaced what it is possible to do in face-to-face interactions. However , they offer organizations and communit ies of practice additional flexibility in how teams are structured and deployed. To do this effectively, we need to learn more about both the opportuni t ies and constraints offered by these new modes of synchronous interaction. This paper grows out of a line of research whose aim is to understand these issues. W e have focused on synchronous in terac t ions a m o n g smal l t e a m s work ing on des ign problems. W e chose small teams because they are such a widespread and enduring fo rm for working on projects in o r g a n i z a t i o n s , and are a h a l l m a r k of such new organizational forms as adhocracies [1,28]. W e chose the task of design because it is a representative ill-structured p rob lem solving task [22 ,25] that in te r l eaves many subprocesses such as planning, creativity, decision-making and cognitive conflict (dimensions in McGrath 's [12] task taxonomy). Design is also usually a col laborat ive task [e.g., I I ] . In this line of research, we began with field studies of groups in real organizations doing software system design [17]. Our goal was to understand better what small group behavior was like for design tasks, and what opportunities existed for supporting this activity with technology. W e learned much about both, leading to our deve loping a simple shared editor called ShrEdit [13] that we felt had properties that would be useful for groups doing these kinds of tasks. It provided the members of a group with an electronic workspace in which they could all enter and edit their ideas. We took ShrEdit into the laboratory to assess this. We created a design task that elicited design behavior similar to what we had seen in the field [19], and compared real groups of three people (i.e., people who knew each other and had worked together before they came into the laboratory) using ShrEdit with groups working with the more traditional meeting room media of whiteboard, and paper and pencil . The groups using ShrEdi t produced

What mix of video and audio is useful for small groups doing remote real-time design work?