Visual analytics, defined as "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces," emerged several years ago as a new research field. While it has seen rapid growth for its first five years of existence, the main focus of visual analytics research has been on developing new techniques and systems rather than identifying how people conduct analysis and how visual analytics tools can help the process and the product of sensemaking. The intelligence analysis community in particular has not been fully examined in visual analytics research even though intelligence analysts are one of the major target users for which visual analytics systems are built. The lack of understanding about how analysts work and how they can benefit from visual analytics systems has created a gap between tools being developed and real world practices. This dissertation is motivated by the observation that existing models of sensemaking/intelligence analysis do not adequately characterize the analysis process and that many visual analytics tools do not truly meet user needs and are not being used effectively by intelligence analysts. I argue that visual analytics research needs to adopt successful HCI practices to better support user tasks and add utility to current work practices. As the first step, my research aims (1) to understand work processes and practices of intelligence analysts and (2) to evaluate a visual analytics system in order to identify where and how visual analytics tools can assist. By characterizing the analysis process and identifying leverage points for future visual analytics tools through empirical studies, I suggest a set of design guidelines and implications that can be used for both designing and evaluating future visual analytics systems.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 68 pages. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study explores human-robot interaction during a 16-hour high-fidelity Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) disaster response drill with teleoperated robots. Situation awareness and team interaction were examined using communication analysis. Operators (n=5) sought assistance from team members to compensate for difficulties building or maintaining situation awareness. Operator-team member communication focused on relating what was seen through the robot's eye view with prior knowledge and planning search strategies. Results suggest operators need a new cognitive mental model to filter and comprehend data provided by the robot, and that robot-assisted search is a team task rather than an individual one. / ABSTRACT: USAR technical search teams need a new shared mental model of robot-assisted search in order to coordinate activities effectively. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Mostafa, J. and Dillon, A. (1996) Design and Evaluation of a User Interface Supporting Multiple Image Query Models. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science, Baltimore, MD, USA, October 21-26, 1996. I. Introduction: Digital image use occurs in many fields. For example, in the area of medicine, huge volumes of digital images are routinely generated for diagnostic purposes, sometimes reaching gigabyte range (Gitlin, 1992). Besser (1990) has designed highly innovative image- based selection systems to improve access to visual resources in architecture, anthropology and art collections. There are also signs that museums and archives have accepted the value of digital image technology in their environments (Besser, 1991; Wentz, 1989). Unfortunately, the technology for effective storage and retrieval of images has not kept pace with the technology of image production. The situation has reached such a critical stage that National Science Foundation (NSF) organized a special workshop on the topic of visual information management (Jain, 1993). The NSF workshop report stated, "It would be impossible to cope with this explosion of image information, unless the images were organized for retrieval. The fundamental problem is that images, video, and other similar data differ from numeric data and text data format, and hence they require a totally different technique of organization, indexing and query processing." This paper addresses the critical need for different techniques in improving retrieval of digital images. Our position is that the user interface is the principal component responsible for facilitating retrieval in databases. Therefore, to assure effective access design of interfaces need to be improved.

This paper reports on part of a study of academic researchers' use of Internet information and communication technologies (IICTs) to support information-seeking activities. The goal of this research is to gain insight into disciplinary and cultural differences of information seeking in the Internet Era. The project is ongoing to include more participants from different cultures.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to our stock of knowledge about who uses networks, how they are used, and what contribution the networks make to advancing the scientific enterprise. Between 1985 and 1990, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) ACCESS data facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provided social scientists in the United States and elsewhere with access through the electronic networks to complex and dynamic statistical data; the 1984 SIPP is a longitudinal panel survey designed to examine economic well-being in the United States. This article describes the conceptual framework and design of SIPP ACCESS; examines how network users communicated with the SIPP ACCESS project staff about the SIPP data; and evaluates one outcome derived from the communications, the improvement of the quality of the SIPP data. The direct and indirect benefits to social scientists of electronic networks are discussed. The author concludes with a series of policy recommendations that link the assessment of our inadequate knowledge base for evaluating how electronic networks advance the scientific enterprise and the SIPP ACCESS research network experience to the policy initiatives of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-194) and the related extensive recommendations embodied in Grand Challenges 1993 High Performance Computing and Communications (The FY 1993 U.S. Research and Development Program).

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Watson, C. (1996) User analysis HCI-the historical lessons from individual differences research. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45(6), 619-638. Abstract: User analysis is a crucial aspect of user-centered systems design, yet Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has yet to formulate reliable and valid characterizations of users beyond gross distinctions based on task and experience. Individual differences research from mainstream psychology has identified a stable set of characteristics that would appear to offer potential application in the HCI arena. Furthermore, in its evolution over the last 100 years, research on individual differences has faced many of the problems of theoretical status and applicability that are common to HCI. In the present paper the relationship between work in cognitive and differential psychology and current analyses of users in HCI is examined. It is concluded that HCI could gain significant predictive power if individual differences research was related to the analysis of users in contemporary systems design.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A., Richardson, J. and McKnight, C. (1991) Institutionalizing Human Factors in the design process: the ADONIS Experience. Contemporary Ergonomics '91, London: Taylor and Francis, 421-426. Abstract: The ADONIS workstation was an experimental document delivery system developed to facilitate retrieval and printing of CD-ROM stored articles. Although primarily aimed at the document supply industry, its potential application in libraries and research environments with end users was recognised. Hence, the present authors were asked to assess the system ergonomically from this perspective, and the outcomes of this assessment form the basis of this paper. It was clear that the design of the system ignored many formal ergonomic considerations. Subsequent user evaluations of the interface highlighted several potentially serious problems and cast doubt on the usability of the system in the end-user domain. A follow-up study of actual usage rates during field-testing of the product confirmed the findings of the initial evaluation and also indicated that some of the very first design decisions (e.g., regarding the choice of journal titles included), which proved detrimental to the system's acceptance, might have been very different if human factors considerations had been taken into account. The present paper describes the system and the problems highlighted by the human factors practitioners as well as discussing the pitfalls that could have been avoided by earlier involvement. The potential role of human factors in early design of such products is emphasised.

This is an early access article. / We investigated the role of subjective factors in the information search process. Forty eight participants each conducted six web searches in a controlled setting. We examined relationships between subjective factors (happiness levels, satisfaction with and confidence in the search results, feeling lost during search, familiarity with and interest in the search topic, estimation of task difficulty), and objective factors (search behavior, search outcomes and search task characteristics). Data analysis was conducted using a multivariate statistical test (Canonical Correlations Analysis). The findings confirmed existence of several relationships suggested by prior research, including relationships between objective search task difficulty and the perception of task difficulty; between subjective states and search behaviors and outcomes. One of the original findings suggests that higher happiness levels before the search and during the search correlate with better feelings after the search, but also correlates with worse search outcomes and lower satisfaction, suggesting that, perhaps, it pays off to feel some â painâ during the search in order to â gainâ quality outcomes.

In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on usersâ mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a group of 25 novice web news readers who were exposed to one of the two designs over 5 sessions is reported. During these sessions a variety of user data were captured, including: comprehension (recall, recognition), usability (time on task, accuracy, user satisfaction), and navigation (path length, category node hits). The between-group difference of web site design was signiï¬ cant for comprehension, usability, and navigation with the users of the genre-conforming design demonstrating better performance. The within-group difference of time was signiï¬ cant across these three measures as well, with performance improving over time. No interaction effect was found between web site design and time on comprehension or usability. However, a surprising interaction effect was found on navigation; speciï¬ cally the breadth of navigation (i.e. the number of nodes visited for two classes of tasks) increased over time more dramatically for the genre-violating group than for the genre-conforming group. By examining the changes in these data over time and between the two designs, evidence for the development of usersâ mental representations of structure was captured.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Maynard, S. (1995) Don't forget to put the cat out! Why collaborative hypermedia and everyday writing pass one another by. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia: Applications and Research, 1, 135-153. Abstract: Hypermedia technology is seen as offering potentially innovative support for the process of writing as much as information access and reading. However, authoring enviroments to date have had little impact in the realâ world production of text. One possible reason is our poor conceptualisation of current writing practice. In the present paper, 31 adult writers kept diaries of their writing activities over the course of one week. The results indicate that for most pople, real world writing is a short communicative act aimed at a limited audience and that technological support for such writing is less likely to resemble a hypermedia workstation than a portable personal communication device. Implications for work in the design of authoring tools are developed.