Digimetaplan: Supporting facilitated brainstorming for distributed business teams

Abstract

While facilitated brainstorming is a proven ideation method for professional teams, distributed teams are currently not able to enjoy its benefits. As workers are shifting towards collaborating in distributed settings, understanding how interactive systems can support facilitated brainstorming is becoming necessary to ensure that distributed teams remain creative. To address this challenge we designed, implemented, and evaluated DigiMetaplan—an interactive surface-based system for distributed facilitated brainstorming for co-located and remote users. The design of DigiMetaplan was inspired by a widely-used facilitated brainstorming method called Metaplan, where the brainstorming process of a group is coordinated by a facilitator. We evaluated the usability of DigiMetaplan with five hybrid teams consisting of a co-located facilitator and two team members connected with one remote participant. Results showed that the features used in DigiMetaplan on interactive surfaces effectively supported teams in performing facilitated collaborative brainstorming in partially distributed settings. We contribute knowledge on how a brainstorming environment translated into a multi-surface distributed system affects facilitated collaboration.