This paper presents an empirical evaluation of key awareness features that may help application developers/designers improve the quality of collaborative software for better user experience (UX). The identified awareness features were obtained through an intensive literature search and typified. Associated with each awareness type were design elements that may be of value to developers at design time in order to improve the quality of the application under development.

A scientific evaluation of the correlation of identified design elements to the types of awareness for the development of collaborative systems was conducted with the participation of experts in the fields. The outcome of the study revealed that awareness plays a significant role in the improvement of the quality of collaborative systems, both from a development point of view and of course at runtime (enhanced UX). In fact, awareness in computing has become a hot topic in that all types of awareness suggested in this paper’s conceptual framework would enhance UX if carefully considered and integrated in the application’s logic at design time by developers.

As case studies, three collaborative applications were considered, which further confirm the importance of awareness of design elements in the development process of collaborative apps. Context-aware computing is increasingly becoming a topic of interest aimed at lowering the total cost of development and enhancing UX.

This paper not only reaffirms the importance of awareness in computing, but also achieves a lot in the identification of design elements that are often identified in silos (and intuitively) for some specific purposes by developers. Having such a consolidated view of awareness types with design elements represents a major achievement because of the effort undertaken through a literature search. Such a consolidated effort provides various development opportunities for improving development cost as well as UX by embedding context-specific design elements as libraries into software production tools, which is a significant achievement.

The paper is very well written and well structured.