Research on Using and Improving Tool to Support Online Work Among Stakeholders During Product Design and Development

The research presented in the paper arose from an industry need for the development of new tools to support remote collaborative design. The current design context requires the collaboration of experts in different areas of expertise to work collectively on the same project. At that point, the authors offer a solution to facilitate simultaneous online work among stakeholders, and recommend a tool to aid this process - The Shared Online Whiteboard. The authors then have conduct an empirical research with the aims to determine if an online shared whiteboard could well support a remote collaborative design task, help synchronize interactions in a conversation, and determine whether the group interactions have been structurally altered when using assistance tools to complete the task or not