CoFind: a browser plugin for investigating co-located collaborative web search

Abstract

Group awareness is a prominent challenge in the field of co-located collaboration in Multi-display Environments (MDE), where several personal and shared devices are operated simultaneously by multiple users. With a focus on Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) and particularly different levels of information sharing, our overall goal is to investigate aspects that influence this group awareness as well as the general group performance in such MDE. In this work, we present the conceptual foundation and approach of a research tool, called CoFind. Developed as a lightweight web browser plugin, which connects collaborators by sharing information resources, it provides comprehensive data and activity logging in the context of user studies and their evaluation. Based on an initial lab experiment, we also present first insights on the feasibility of our approach and the utility of our developed tool, allowing to plan and carry out further user studies in this challenging research field.