Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 238

be enough matches to make its use worthwhile for either driver or passenger. In the
past, these rides were arranged informally (e.g., by word of mouth) and using
bulletin boards. So the group size, location, and destination will all have an effect.
Group size is likely to be a negative factor in rural areas where the group and the
population density are both likely to be smaller. On the other hand, group cohe-
siveness may be greater, as the group members may know each other and be
headed to the same destinations. The risks in developing this system do not appear
to be technological, but more related to social engineering.

8.3.10 Team Processes and Tasks

It is important to understand the tasks the group is trying to perform. There may be
different ways to do the task, and there may be different tasks that can be chosen.
Within a volunteer organization, for example, some groups will perform better on
activism tasks and some groups will perform better on outreach and education tasks.
The way that tasks are divided between the team members and how the team
members communicate will affect team performance. Olson and Olson ( 2000 ,
2008 ) note the importance of the coupling of work, that is, how closely team
members have to work together. For technical work and in discussions of risk, for
example, the collaborators frequently need to be co-located so that they can
communicate fully, whereas in other situations, such as open source software
development, remote coupling may be possible.
It is therefore important to adapt the processes to the team and to the tasks.
Common ground is a shared set of knowledge, expectations, and understanding
about the people on the team and the task. Establishing common ground is an
important factor in team performance (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986 ; Olson and
Olson 2000 ) and should therefore be encouraged by systems and system designers.
You may also need to think about people's motivation for doing the task in the
first place. Pink ( 2009 ) argues that boring and repetitive work still requires
extrinsic motivation (Pink describes this as Motivation 2.0) to get people to do the
tasks, and this was covered in Chap. 4 . In those situations where people want to do
the work, however, Pink argues that they are intrinsically motivated to do the tasks
(he calls this Motivation 3.0). Pink suggests that Motivation 3.0 applies to creative
work and leisure, most of design (including design of software, systems and
interfaces), many engineering tasks, and most knowledge work.

8.3.11 Implications for System Design

These factors make numerous suggestions about how to design systems, and this
section can only note a few for some common systems. For distributed users, like
those

on YouTube, these factors suggest that it is possible to encourage