Many professionals, like journalists, writers, or consultants, need to acquire information from various sources, make sense of this unstructured evidence, structure their observations, and finally create and deliver their product, such as a report or a presentation. In formative interviews, we found that tools allowing structuring of observations are often disconnected from the corresponding evidence. Therefore, we designed a sensemaking environment with a flexible observation graph that visually ties together evidence in unstructured documents with the user’s structured knowledge. This is achieved through bi-directional deep links between highlighted document portions and nodes in the observation graph. In a controlled study, we compared users’ sensemaking strategies using either the observation graph or a simple text editor on a large display. Results show that the observation graph represents a holistic, compact representation of users’ observations, which can be linked to unstructured evidence on demand. In contrast, users taking textual notes required much more display space to spatially organize source documents containing unstructured evidence. This implies that spatial organization is a powerful strategy to structure observations even if the available space is limited.

许多专业人士，例如新闻工作者，作家或顾问，需要从各种来源获取信息，了解这些非结构化的证据，构​​建其观察结果，并最终创建并交付其产品（例如报告或演示文稿）。在形成性访谈中，我们发现用于构建观察结果的工具通常与相应的证据脱节。因此，我们设计了一个具有灵活观察图的感官环境，该观察图将非结构化文档中的证据与用户的结构化知识可视化地联系在一起。这是通过突出显示的文档部分与观察图中的节点之间的双向深层链接实现的。在一项对照研究中，我们在大型显示器上使用观察图或简单的文本编辑器比较了用户的感知策略。结果表明，观察图代表了用户观察的整体，紧凑表示，可以与非结构化的按需证据关联。相比之下，记笔记的用户需要更多的显示空间来空间组织包含非结构化证据的源文档。这意味着即使可用空间有限，空间组织也是构造观察结果的有效策略。