WHO IS THE USER? INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, COMMUNITIES - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 33

setting, scheming, and actions. These collective needs change as unanticipated parties enter and
leave the HCI experience, presenting challenges for systems designers.
Second, and potentially more challenging for designers, is the dynamic nature of the goals and
tasks in which users today engage even if the composition of the user set is stable. Groups, organi-
zations, and communities act within volatile markets and sociopolitical environments, so the nature
of a group's (or any collective) work is likely to be highly changeable both in its components and in
the interdependencies that link those components (Ilinitch, Lewin, and D'Aveni, 1998). The increas-
ing trend toward knowledge work exacerbates this effect. Fluctuating task needs make systems spec-
ification arduous, to say the least, impacting not only the design of user-computer interfaces but also
construction of databases, infrastructure, and other related system components.
The dynamic nature of work and who conducts it has always presented a challenge for systems
designers, but the point is that today such dynamism is far more likely and the impacts more far-
reaching. Why? Users and the computers they use are interconnected through a vast and distributed
web of social relationships. Thus, unanticipated bottlenecks or deficiencies in an HCI experience
can quickly ramify, spreading problems beyond any one person or task.
Background Participation
Traditionally designers thought of users as the parties having direct interaction with a computer
through touch, speech, or some other direct means. The user was one who entered and retrieved
information, or at least viewed reports. As computers advanced to support work teams, the notion
of user broadened to include all members of a designated group, that is, the set of parties who send
and receive information to and fro. Today this conception of user is limited because it presumes
that all group members are interacting with each other when, in fact, there are also users
who play a passive role, observing group members rather than directly interacting with them. As
examples, we have Web cams to view meeting rooms and lurkers who read online discussions
without contributing to them.
Today it is possible for users of group, organizational, or community systems to operate online
in the background rather than in the foreground, choosing to observe or glimpse group activities
without contributing or otherwise interacting with people (see Smith and Kollock, 1999). Back-
ground participants may not be readily identifiable as belonging to a given user group, but they are
computer users nonetheless, in that they can retrieve and in some cases manipulate information.
They can pass information retrieved from one group or organization to people outside that target
group; and they can be observed and tracked while they do these things. Background participants
may have somewhat different needs with regard to computer technology than traditional users.
For example, background users may desire features to support observation and search, whereas
foreground users prefer support for contribution, influence, and exit. One can also imagine situa-
tions where individuals or groups of users may move from foreground to background, or vice
versa. The HCI needs of background participation have yet to be fully understood.
Transparency
Concurrent with the capability for background participation in IS environments is the increas-
ingly public nature of computer use (Dutton, 1999). In our Internet age, information is not only
stored and processed by computers but also linked, distributed, rearranged, translated, analyzed,
annotated, blogged, and so on. User-computer interaction threatens to be less intimate (i.e., con-
fined) if others observe or have later access to what users do—or do not do—online. As examples,