Conceptual design for sensemaking

The focus of sensemaking research is often on process and resources such as "schemas" and "frames". Less attention has been paid to the conceptual structures that make up the schema or frame, or how visualisations can be designed to support users' conceptual structures. In this chapter, we present an approach to gathering user requirements based on the conceptual structures that people are working with when making sense of a domain. We illustrate the approach with examples drawn from our own experience of designing, prototyping and testing an interactive visualisation tool for making sense of academic literature and of studies of sensemaking by lawyers and journalists. We discuss how to move from requirements to design, drawing on a classification of visualisations that highlights their principal conceptual structuring basis. Since each individual makes sense in their own way, it is beneficial to include features that enable people to work with a representation in their own way; for this, appropriation tools are helpful. We discuss the design of such features. Finally, we present an approach to evaluating interactive visualisations in terms of their support for sensemaking, focusing on the quality of the fit between users and system

Towards an approach for analysing external representations created during sensemaking using generative grammar

During sensemaking, users often create external representations to help them make sense of what they know, and what they need to know. In doing so, they necessarily adopt or construct some form of representational language using the tools at hand. By describing such languages implicit in representations we believe that we are better able to describe and differentiate what users do and better able to describe and differentiate interfaces that might support them. Drawing on approaches to the analysis of language, and in particular, Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory, we analyse the representations that users create to expose their underlying ‘visual grammar’. We do this in the context of a user study involving evidential reasoning. Participants were asked to address an adapted version of IEEE VAST 2011 mini challenge 3 (interpret a potential terrorist plot implicit in a set of news reports). We show how our approach enables the unpacking of the heterogeneous and embedded nature of user-generated representations and allows us to show how visual grammars evolve and become more complex over time in response to evolving sensemaking needs

Conceptual design for sensemaking

The focus of sensemaking research is often on process and resources such as “schemas” and “frames”. Less attention has been paid to the conceptual structures that make up the schema or frame, or how visualisations can be designed to support users’ conceptual structures. In this chapter, we present an approach to gathering user requirements based on the conceptual structures that people are working with when making sense of a domain. We illustrate the approach with examples drawn from our own experience of designing, prototyping and testing an interactive visualisation tool for making sense of academic literature and of studies of sensemaking by lawyers and journalists. We discuss how to move from requirements to design, drawing on a classification of visualisations that highlights their principal conceptual structuring basis. Since each individual makes sense in their own way, it is beneficial to include features that enable people to work with a representation in their own way; for this, appropriation tools are helpful. We discuss the design of such features. Finally, we present an approach to evaluating interactive visualisations in terms of their support for sensemaking, focusing on the quality of the fit between users and system

A classification of sensemaking representations

Interest in sensemaking has recently gained prominence in human-computer interaction research. Efforts are being made to better understand sensemaking to help inform the design of appropriate computer-based tools. In this position paper we address the problem of design by presenting a propositional classification of sensemaking situations from a representational perspective. When people engage in sensemaking they organize information into structures which they use as a basis for guiding interpretation and the search for further data. It is these structures that we look at and classify in terms of representations. This position paper argues that such a classification can be used as a starting point to inform the design of sensemaking support tools