How Sensemaking Tools Influence Display Space Usage
This addresses the problem of optimizing display space usage for analysts, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work on spatial organization behaviors.
The study investigated how a bidirectionally linked concept-graph (BLC) tool affects users' knowledge externalization strategies in an intelligence analysis task, finding that it led to significantly less display space usage and fewer open windows compared to a control condition.
We explore how the availability of a sensemaking tool influences users' knowledge externalization strategies. On a large display, users were asked to solve an intelligence analysis task with or without a bidirectionally linked concept-graph (BLC) to organize insights into concepts (nodes) and relations (edges). In BLC, both nodes and edges maintain "deep links" to the exact source phrases and sections in associated documents. In our control condition, we were able to reproduce previously described spatial organization behaviors using document windows on the large display. When using BLC, however, we found that analysts apply spatial organization to BLC nodes instead, use significantly less display space and have significantly fewer open windows.