When? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 58

Figure 5.7: CoSense's workspace view depicts the set of webpages that group members have commented
on, and allows users to apply tags to organize and make further sense of their findings. These tags can be
used to filter the view. The right-hand portion of this view provides free-form “to do” and “scratch pad”
lists that can be collaboratively edited, as well as allowing users to link external files to the workspace.
This view was more frequently used during asynchronous, rather than synchronous, collaboration.
patterns of tightly-and loosely-coupled collaboration that occur even within a synchronous work
session (as some initial studies of TeamSearch ( Morris et al. , 2006 ) have begun to do).
Understanding the frequency of users' engagement in collaborative search activities is also an
important direction for future work. For instance, if users engage in collaborative search activities
very frequently, that might suggest that collaborative search tools should be an integral part of the
standard search experience, whereas if such collaborations are more rare, highly-planned events, then
dedicated, special-purpose tools might be more appropriate. A diary study of twenty information
workers found that over a one-week period they each engaged in an average of two (and maximum
of five) collaborative search experiences when using status quo technologies ( Amershi and Morris ,
2009 ). Of course, the frequency with which people engage in collaborative searching may increase
as the tools to do so become more widespread.
Collaborative search systems may be able to control factors that encourage more active partic-
ipation in collaborative search activities, helping to transform a slow, asynchronous experience into
a faster, more real-time one. For example, research has shown that response times on Q&A sites
tend to be long. Zhang et al. ( 2007 ) reported that when expert Java users posted questions to the
Java Developer Forum, the average time to receive a response was nearly 9 hours. Hsieh and Counts
( 2009 ) reported that the average time to receive an answer to a question posted to Microsoft's Live