Usability studies of system failures have pointed to the need to account for some aspect of the social periphery or border. Design changes, intended to increase task interaction and group cohesion have been incorporated in a number of subsystems. One system refinement, intended to support low level group cohesion and task interaction, is an awareness agent. The evolution of the agent is briefly outlined below. The awareness agent provides a bitmap image of users who are currently active in the system.
Bitmap images appear and disappear as users connect and disconnect.
Clicking on a bitmap sets up a talk session with that user. Like other awareness systems, as opposed to conferencing agents, it represents a low bandwidth demand on the system. The framework suggests several ways awareness and cohesion might be enhanced via an agent of this type. This would enable group members to annotate their images with their names, a short message, or to quickly exchange information that may be pertinent to their task. This would give group members more information and may help to increase awareness and cohesion.