Come Browse with Me: Interaction Patterns in Remote Collaborative Web Browsing

The rising popularity of remote collaboration has brought different sharing options increasingly into focus. While traditional screen sharing is well-suited for presentation-like scenarios, other situations require more balanced and flexibly coupled interaction between participants facilitating collaborative writing, multi-pointer interaction, or awareness mechanisms. Although the web is a place where people meet and interact, browsing for information is still mainly an individual activity. We thus explore the potential of synchronous, WYSIWIS-like collaborative browsing through a study with 31 participants in 8 teams who collaborated on a short-term task, facilitated by a prototypical browser extension ("CollaBrowse"). The central qualitative analysis revealed seven recurring patterns of collaborative interaction, linked to a reduction of explicit coordination effort, and more informed and consensual decisions. These results were confirmed by an additional quantitative analysis suggesting that the WYSIWIS functionality led to closer collaboration, increased awareness, and better support of task space and reference space.