WYSIWIS revised: early experiences with multi-user interfaces

ABSTRACT

WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) is a foundational abstraction for multi-user interfaces that expresses many of the characteristics of a chalkboard in face-to-face meetings. In its strictest interpretation, it means that everyone can see the same written information and also where anyone else is pointing. We present several examples of multi-user interfaces that start from the WYSIWIS abstraction. In our attempts to build software support for collaboration in meetings, we have discovered that WYSIWIS is at once crucial and too inflexible in its strictest sense. WYSIWIS must be relaxed for all our software tools to better accommodate important interactions in meetings. Relaxations to WYSIWIS are characterized in terms of constraints on its four key dimensions: display space, time of display, subgroup population, and congruence of view.

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