Effects of sensemaking translucence on distributed collaborative analysis

N Goyal, SR Fussell - Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on …, 2016 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative …, 2016dl.acm.org
Collaborative sensemaking requires that analysts share their information and insights with
each other, but this process of sharing runs the risks of prematurely focusing the
investigation on specific suspects. To address this tension, we propose and test an interface
for collaborative crime analysis that aims to make analysts more aware of their sensemaking
processes. We compare our sensemaking translucence interface to a standard interface
without special sensemaking features in a controlled laboratory study. We found that the …
Collaborative sensemaking requires that analysts share their information and insights with each other, but this process of sharing runs the risks of prematurely focusing the investigation on specific suspects. To address this tension, we propose and test an interface for collaborative crime analysis that aims to make analysts more aware of their sensemaking processes. We compare our sensemaking translucence interface to a standard interface without special sensemaking features in a controlled laboratory study. We found that the sensemaking translucence interface significantly improved clue finding and crime solving performance, but that analysts rated the interface lower on subjective measures than the standard interface. We conclude that designing for distributed sensemaking requires balancing task performance vs. user experience and real-time information sharing vs. data accuracy.
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