Supporting Collaboration in Small Volunteer Groups with Socio-Technical Heuristics

In this paper, we present a study on group work in which student volunteers from different disciplines worked together to create an augmented reality expedition. The goal of the project was to develop an augmented campus tour for students. The project was successful in delivering the app but through post project interviews we found that volunteers were not satisfied with the process and expressed negative insights. In order to understand this phenomenon, we developed and applied a set of categories for detecting underlying problems in socio-technical processes of volunteer group work. Applying those categories to the aforementioned project allowed us to assess their feasibility. This led to refined categories that can potentially support other volunteer groups to create a suitable socio-technical environment.