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-- Shimada, Kitajima, & Morikawa (2005)Shimada, H., Kitajima, M. & Morikawa, O. (2005). VARAMM: Mental Model of Remote Communication. HCI International 2005.
VARAMM: Mental Model of Remote CommunicationWhen encountering a remote communication system, people transform the knowledge known to work in daily faceto- face communication into a workable form for the current situation and utilize it for generating appropriate actions. However, we argue that this transformation often fails, causing serious communication problems. In this paper, we regard this transformation of knowledge as a knowledge mapping process between virtual actions performed on a remote communication system and real actions conducted in the real world, and propose the Virtual-Action Real- Action Mapping Model (VARAMM), a new way of representing users' knowledge about mappings. VARAMM works on a hierarchically organized knowledge base, i.e., script-goal-action hierarchy, and explains users' behavior in remote communication systems observed in two independent studies. First, VARAMM explains the diversity of behavior people demonstrated when using a single remote communication system (Morikawa and Maesako, 1998) because of the diversity in the mappings users might have generated when initially using the system. Some behaviors were intended by the system designer, but others were not. Second, VARAMM explains users' behavioral changes when a remote communication system is reconfigured (Yamazaki et al., 1998) because of the reorganization of the script-goal structure triggered by the recognition of the reconfiguration that eventually enabled the intended functionality of the system. Based on these explanations, we claim that usability problems in remote communication systems should exist at least at two levels, action mapping and script-goal structure. These problems are very serious since they are not solved inherently by mere repetitive use of the remote communication systems, which only strengthens existing knowledge on mapping and the script-goal structure. We suggest that designing to users' knowledge will solve these usability problems. We also feel that representing users' knowledge in VARAMM provides useful insights for system developers to identify the knowledge, mapping or script-goal structure, that may block the intended system' functionalities and for discovering efficient ways to make them available to the users.
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