Evaluating coordination support mechanisms in an industrial engineering scenario

Nowadays, industrial engineering collaboration plays a crucial role along product development life cycle, especially for problem-solving and decision-making processes. This paper evaluates the acceptance of two coordination mechanisms for groups when working on a machine diagnosis report collaboratively. The evaluation is organized as a user study and is based on two hypothesis: groups will prefer unstructured over structured coordination, and groups using structured coordination will accomplish their task more efficiently. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.