nucleation

LIT-759: Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces

1 min read

Properties3
StatusUnavailable — registered 2026-10-06 from Crossref and secondary descriptions of its abstract, not read: the ACM Digital Library refused this client. Filed as the source of the argument that a cooperative application fails when those who must do the extra work are not those who benefit, the failure an argument-development scheme here would most likely meet. It stays Unavailable until somebody reads it, not on merit.
Version3
Tagsdesign-rationale

Graph View

Jonathan Grudin (1988), Proceedings of the 1988 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘88), 85–93 — DOI-10.1145/62266.62273

Key takeaways

Registered, not read. As its abstract is reported: applications that support cooperative work have received heavy investment and fallen far short of expectations. Three factors are named:

  • the disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it;
  • the lack of management intuition for such applications;
  • the extreme difficulty of evaluating them.

The first is the cost-and-benefit argument the design-rationale literature takes as its own.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-06 at the owner’s request, with the rest of the design-rationale batch under ADR-030. See the curation entry of that day for why the batch is here.

Backlinks