Sarah Faisal

Making sense of personal health information: Challenges for information visualization:

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on information visualization for making sense of personal health information. Based on this review, five application themes were identified: treatment planning, examination of patients’ medical records, representation of pedigrees and family history, communication and shared decision making, and life management and health monitoring. While there are recognized design challenges associated with each of these themes, such as how best to represent data visually and integrate qualitative and quantitative information, other challenges and opportunities have received little attention to date. In this article, we highlight, in particular, the opportunities for supporting people in better understanding their own illnesses and making sense of their health conditions in order to manage them more effectively.

Developing User Requirements for Visualizations of Literature Knowledge Domains

As researchers we are constantly working with our literature domains. Making sense and familiarizing ourselves with such domains is a cumbersome but necessary task that is part of every researchers career, especially novices. Literature knowledge domain visualizations exist which assist users in extracting and interpreting interesting patterns. However, these visualizations tend to be developed without reference to the particular needs of researchers or without addressing the specific challenges of the literature knowledge domain. This paper therefore targets the needs of researchers as they work with their literature. We conducted a qualitative study to understand how researchers make sense of their literature domains. Such information assisted us in coming up with a set of design considerations and guidelines which we believe will assist in building visualizations that are useful for the general research population

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.