All computer systems, single user or multi-user, interact with the work-groups and organizations in which they are used.
We need to understand normal human-human communication:
face-to-face communication involves eyes, face and body
conversation can be analyzed to establish its detailed structure.
This can then be applied to text-based conversation, which has:
reduced feedback for confirmation
less context to disambiguate utterances
slower pace of interaction
but is more easily reviewed.
Group working is more complex than that of a single person:
it is influenced by the physical environment
experiments are more difficult to control and record
field studies must take into account the social situation.