Making end-users autonomous in the design of their active documents

Documents are a fundamental player in professional practices. Since the introduction of computer-based systems, an ever increasing number of organizations considered the full transition to digital documents in order to manage the exponential amount of information that they generate with their activities. However, this "imposed" transition has not been painless: usually the employees work together to reach a common goal, and during time they develop and constantly maintain some unwritten conventions with the aim to support them in performing their collaborative activities. Several field studies demonstrated that in these work settings documents are a fundamental part of these conventions, highlighting at the same time the problems that arose after the transition to a document-based system. Actually, the flexibility of paper-based documents is lost with the transitions to digital documents, since employees can not autonomously adapt both the informative content and the arrangement of their digital documents. Consequently, the limits of document-based systems hinder their acceptance among employees, with the risk of nullifying the advantages that the organization management expected with the transition to digital documents. In order to avoid this kind of problems, collaborative systems should be conceived to not force users to change their work habits, and in particular these systems should provide users with (i) a flexible support for their work practices, taking into account the existence of local and informal conventions and proactively promoting "collaboration awareness" among users, and (ii) a customizable environment that they can autonomously adapt to their actual and constantly evolving needs. These two requirements are at the basis of the work that is presented in this thesis, which focuses on document-based collaborative systems. In order to meet such requirements in the design of this kind of applications, this work puts its roots in both the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and End-User Development (EUD) research fields. In particular, the aim of the presented research work is to give a contribution to the design and implementation of technologies supportive of cooperative work that allow users to autonomously tailor their document-based systems to their needs with the flexibility of paper-based documents. More specifically, tailoring activities must not only involve the flexible definition of the informative content of documents, even if this possibility does not have to be considered trivial; rather, users must be autonomous in performing those tailoring activities that allow them to customize their systems to support the local conventions of the group in which they work. Putting in the hands of users the ability to customize systems they use every day strongly contributes in making the transition from paper-based documents to digital documents less painful, with positive effects on work practices of users. Moreover, leveraging the possibility to autonomously customize systems to support local conventions, users can also be supported in the improvement of their work habits, through a collaborative learning process.