Some of you may have responded to a survey sent out in May by a research group under Dr. Mark Zachry in the Technical Communication department at the University of Washington (my alma mater). Even if you did not, the results of the survey are quite interesting.

Five years ago we did not have the easily available services, such as Google Docs, that we have today. One of my projects in grad school at the UDub was developing an interface mock-up for collaborative work amongst evening graduate students who could not easily meet between classes.

This research shows that 20% of knowledge workers use some form of publicly-available online services as part of their work. Click the graphic to download a PDF of the poster.


In UUX, we use Google Docs extensively both for the leadership to work together on reports and other documents, and to communicate with members. We also use a blog and Twitter and are working on the launch of a pilot wiki for cooperative creation of Web resource links.

The abstract is quoted below and the abstract PDF is available online:

This(research)presents the preliminary results of a national survey of knowledge workers about their use of publicly available, Web-based application services to support cooperative work. Our aim is to understand how widespread the use of such technologies is, and—further—to develop a
sense of the sorts of activities these technologies support.

Labels: collaboration