Creating Virtual Communities That Work

The use and import of virtual collaboration (VC) has increased at an exponential rate. Despite its potential advantages, however, VC continues to be hindered by feelings of distrust, detachment, and even isolation among virtual team members. For each of these reasons, the present study analyzed more than 1,500 survey responses to develop best practices for current users and developers of e-collaboration software. More specifically, this study used an expanded variation of Vorvoreanu's (2008) Website Experience Analysis (WEA) to explore participants' views of the seven most popular VC programs in use today: Basecamp, Dropbox, Google Drive, iDoneThis, Join.me, Skitch, and Skype. Qualitative results of this study revealed the significance of (1) name recognition, (2) interpersonal facilitation, (3) clarity/simplicity, (4) cost consideration, and (5) mobile accessibility. The study's results were then used to develop five corresponding implications for both users and developers: (1) increased integration, (2) expanded physicality, (3) supplemental training, (4) financial entrée, and (5) utilized flexibility.

Unified mobile accessibility guidelines (UMAG)

The attributes of a software product such as usability and accessibility are crucial, they allow the user to reach his/her goals, and additionally they give a better user experience. The first of them, usability, is oriented to satisfy the needs of the user with average capabilities and the second, accessibility is related to the users with disabilities. There is a lot of work published about web accessibility but, it is not the same case for mobile accessibility. This paper focuses on mobile accessibility guidelines, its overall aim consists of a set of unified mobile accessibility guidelines, based on guidelines such as Android, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The method consisted of: Examine and organize the existent guidelines; find elements/components and properties/attributes related to them; verify if the guideline applies to the mobile environment then, unify guidelines if there are two or more of them. The result of this work consists of a set of unified guidelines to develop a mobile accessibility guidelines standard.