Effects of Sensemaking Translucence on Distributed Collaborative Analysis
This addresses the challenge of balancing performance and user experience in distributed sensemaking for analysts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interface design principles.
The study tackled the problem of premature focus in collaborative crime analysis by testing a sensemaking translucence interface, finding it significantly improved clue finding and crime solving performance but received lower subjective ratings compared to a standard interface.
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.