Looking for fraud in digital footprints: sensemaking with chronologies in a large corporate investigation

During extended sensemaking tasks people typically create external representations that integrate information and support their thinking. Understanding the variety, role and use of these is important for understanding sensemaking and how to support it effectively. We report a case-study of a large, document-based fraud investigation undertaken by a law firm. We focus on the construction and use of integrated representations in the form of chronologies. We show how these supported conjecture recording, focussing on time-periods, identifying gaps, identifying connections and reviewing interpretations. We use our findings to highlight limitations of a previous analysis of representations in sensemaking which regards this as schema definition and population. The findings also argue for search tools designed to identify date references in documents, for the support of ad-hoc event selections, and the support of linking between integrating representations and source documents

Understanding “influence”: An exploratory study of academics’ process of knowledge construction through iterative and interactive information seeking

The motivation for this study is to better understand the searching and sensemaking processes undertaken to solve exploratory tasks for which people lack pre-existing frames. To investigate people’s strategies for that type of task, we focused on “influence” tasks because, although they appear to be unfamiliar, they arise in much academic discourse, at least tacitly. This qualitative study reports the process undertaken by academics of different levels of seniority to complete exploratory search tasks that involved identifying influential members of their academic community and “rising stars, ” and to identify similar roles in an unfamiliar academic community. 11 think-aloud sessions followed by semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the role of specific and general domain expertise in the process of information seeking and knowledge construction. Academics defined and completed the task through an iterative and interactive process of seeking and sensemaking, during which they constructed an understanding of their communities and determined qualities of “being influential”. Elements of the Data/Frame Theory of Sensemaking (Klein et al., 2007) were used as sensitising theoretical constructs. The study shows that both external and internal knowledge resources are essential to define a starting point or frame, make and support decisions, and experience satisfaction. Ill-defined or non-existent initial frames may cause unsubstantial or arbitrary decisions, and feelings of uncertainty and lack of confidence

E-discovery viewed as integrated human-computer sensemaking: the challenge of 'Frames'

In addressing the question of the design on technologies for e-discovery it is essential to recognise that such work takes place through a system in which both people and technology interact as a complex whole. Technology can promote discovery and insight and support human sensemaking, but the question hangs on the extent to which it naturally extends the way that legal practitioners think and work. We describe research at UCL which uses this as a starting point for empirical studies to inform the design of supporting technologies. We report aspects of an interview field study with lawyers who worked on a large regulatory investigation. Using data from this study we describe document review and analysis in terms of a sequence of transitions between different kinds of representation. We then focus on one particular transition: the creation of chronology records from documents. We develop the idea that investigators make sense of evidence by the application of conceptual ‘frames’ (Klein et al’s, 2006), but whilst the investigator ‘sees’ the situation in terms of these frames, the system ‘sees’ the situation in terms of documents, textual tokens and metadata. We conclude that design leverage can be obtained through the development of technologies that aggregate content around investigators’ frames. We outline further research to explore this further

Effective ways to use nonpersonal information in healthcare: report from a workshop held at University College London 15-16 April 2004

New information technologies are being introduced in the UK National Health Service as resources for the acquisition of clinical knowledge. These are forcing working practices to adapt and are affecting and challenging perceived roles, relationships and expectations of patients and health professionals alike. Effective ways to use nonpersonal information in healthcare was a two-day workshop hosted by UCL Interaction Centre at University College London intended to provide a forum for practioners and researchers working in the area of clinical health information delivery to come together to discuss access to health information, and to consider how the various challenges and opportunities relating to electronic information provision can be managed most effectively. For the first day of the workshop, the theme for presentations and discussion was information provision for and access by health professionals. Talks were given by Julius Weinberg (City University, London), Roger Slack (University of Edinburgh) and Anne Adams (University College London). The theme for the second day was information provision and access by patients. Presentations were given by Mig Muller (NHS Direct), Jane Wilson (Whittington Hospital and Medi-notes), Andrew Herxheimer (University of Oxford) and Henry Potts (University College London). On both days, delegates formed into three groups for breakout sessions in which they discussed and reported back on: information quality and use, social and organisational context, and user requirements and training in relation to the respective daily theme (health practitioners/patients). This report summerises each of the presentations and the reports by the breakout groups

‘I’ll just Google it!’: Should lawyers’ perceptions of Google inform the design of electronic legal resources?

Lawyers, like many user groups, regularly use Google to find information for their work. We present results of a series of interviews with academic and practicing lawyers, where they discuss in what situations they use various electronic resources and why. We find lawyers use Google due to a variety of factors, many of which are related to the need to find information quickly. Lawyers also talk about Google with a certain affection not demonstrated when discussing other resources. Although we can design legal resources to emulate Google or design them based on factors perceived to make Google successful, we suggest this is unlikely to better support legal information-seeking. Instead, we suggest the importance of taking a number of inter-related tradeoffs, related to the factors identified in our study, into account when designing electronic legal resources to help ensure they are useful, usable and used

Subjective information visualizations

Information Visualizations (InfoViz) are systems that require high levels of cognitive processing. They revolve around the notion of decoding and interpreting visual patterns in order to achieve certain goals. We argue that purely designing for the visual will not allow for optimum experiences since there is more to InfoViz than just the visual. Interaction is a key to achieving higher levels of knowledge. In this position paper we present a different perspective on the underlying meaning of interaction, where we describe it as incorporating both the visual and the physical activities. By physical activities we mean the physical actions upon the physical input device/s. We argue that interaction is the key element for supporting users’ subjective experiences hence these experiences should first be understood. All the discussions in this paper are based upon on going work in the field of visualizing the literature knowledge domain (LKDViz)

A Study of Legal Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Electronic Legal Research Tools

Our work is motivated by the desire to support digital library users in ?getting to grips? with electronic resources. More specifically we are motivated by the desire to support users in understanding how to use, and in which situations it is appropriate to use, particular digital library or electronic resources. This work focuses on lawyers as a specific category of user; Callister [5] highlights that lawyers been traditionally regarded as having poor research skills. Electronic research skills are no exception: Howland and Lewis [8] surveyed U.S. law firm librarians to examine the quality and extent of the electronic legal research skills of summer clerks and first-year associates. They found that these graduates were unable to efficiently or effectively research issues that appear routinely in actual legal cases and concluded that they were not efficient or cost-effective users of LexisNexis and Westlaw (the two biggest digital law libraries in terms of case, legislation and journal coverage). This was despite all of the students having received some training on how to use the libraries while in law school. Digital libraries have traditionally been regarded as difficult to use [4] and based on our contextual observations with academic lawyers, digital law libraries such as LexisNexis Professional and Westlaw are no exception. We believe that this difficulty of use contributes to the problems that lawyers face with electronic legal research. Furthermore, we argue that developing better research skills goes hand-inhand with developing an understanding of the electronic environments in which these skills must be practiced. Our current work is focused on gaining a better understanding of legal academics? and professionals? information seeking behaviour when using existing electronic resources. This understanding will then be used to inform the design of user-centred support tools for digital law libraries (and potentially the design of the libraries themselves)

Usability evaluation of digital libraries: a tutorial

This one-day tutorial is an introduction to usability evaluation for Digital Libraries. In particular, we will introduce Claims Analysis. This approach focuses on the designers’ motivations and reasons for making particular design decisions and examines the effect on the user’s interaction with the system. The general approach, as presented by Carroll and Rosson(1992), has been tailored specifically to the design of digital libraries. Digital libraries are notoriously difficult to design well in terms of their eventual usability. In this tutorial, we will present an overview of usability issues and techniques for digital libraries, and a more detailed account of claims analysis, including two supporting techniques – simple cognitive analysis based on Norman’s ‘action cycle’ and Scenarios and personas. Through a graduated series of worked examples, participants will get hands-on experience of applying this approach to developing more usable digital libraries. This tutorial assumes no prior knowledge of usability evaluation, and is aimed at all those involved in the development and deployment of digital libraries