Perceived Quality of Cloud Based Applications for Collaborative Writing

More recently, Internet has experienced a complete makeover and has developed into an always-connected and device-independent environment. Under the influence of new technological trends, including Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing, there has been a shift in the approach to the development of Web applications. Static Web pages that used to be designed for passive recipients of information have been re-placed with dynamic applications that enable participants to actively contribute in creating knowledge repositories. Owing to their features, collaborative editors, as examples of SaaS, have a potential to be used for both educational and professional purposes. This chapter presents the results of our research into the perceived quality of collaborative editors in which two complementary methods were used: the retrospective thinking aloud (RTA) method and a questionnaire. Through analysis of collected data, advantages and disadvantages of collaborative editors were obtained. In addition, the guidelines for their improvement and further development of similar types of applications are proposed.