Show me a good time: using content to provide activity awareness to collaborators with activityspotter.

ABSTRACTIn order to study the effect supporting awareness of a colleague's activity on a collaborator's communication intentions, we developed ActivitySpotter. It is a research tool and awareness display that determines a user's current activity through a semantic analysis of documents s/he accesses and shares this information with collaborators. We ran a user study on 22 participants to investigate how accurately ActivitySpotter represents user activity and whether different representations of activity (presence only, topic keywords, or activity labels) influence awareness differently and lead users to change their contact intention. Our findings suggest that activity content awareness can help users glean more about what their collaborators are doing, especially if they are more socially distant, and can afford screen space to have the display showing. This increase in awareness also positively influences users' intentions to communicate in a socially appropriate manner.