INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 70 INTERACTIONS JULY–AUGUST2014
Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of UX issues it addresses,
methodological, and professional issues that arise in the field’s continuing effort to contribute robust information about users
to product planning and design. — David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors
FORUM EVALUATION AND USABILITY
Insights
→ The SuperIdentity project has
benefited from UCD techniques.
→ Use cases provided an
understanding of common known
attributes and desired attributes
across potential users.
→ The use of visualizations has
facilitated understanding the
SuperIdentity model.
→ Other research projects should
consider potential benefits
of UCD techniques.
Applying User-Centered Design
to Research Work
Jean Scholtz, Oriana Love, William Pike, Joseph Bruce, Dee Kim, and Arthur McBain, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
By now almost everyone is familiar with the use of user-centered design (UCD) techniques to develop software products, but less common is the idea of
using UCD techniques to shape and
guide the directions of an academic
research project. The SuperIdentity
(SID) project is aimed at helping
workers engaged in identification tasks.
Research of this type rarely includes
UCD work, as no specific end product
is anticipated and, therefore, no user
interaction. However, SID researchers
decided that an understanding of
potential end users would be beneficial
in focusing their research efforts. They
agreed that an early activity should be to
study some people whose work involved
identifying individuals to determine
how they did this, what information
they started with, their end goal, the
resources they used, and any problems
they encountered. This knowledge
would enable the project to focus the
research more specifically to support
the issues faced by end users currently
engaged in identification tasks. Here, we
describe how this UCD input is helping
to shape the SID research work even
beyond expectations.
More specifically, the SID research
project is an identity attribution and
enrichment project that uses attributes
from the biographical, biometric, cyber,
and psychological domains to produce
a fuller, more accurate “identity” of an
individual. For example, knowledge
of an individual’s online activities can
provide insight into personality traits
through analysis of online content,
The project is developing a model
of identity attributes in these domains
to support individuals in finding paths
among and between these domains to
provide more robust identifications
of individuals. UCD work is helping
project researchers understand how
law enforcement, cyber security
investigators, and intelligence analysts
currently work and how they view the
utility of the SID research project.
The SID research project is a
collaboration between six universities
in the U.K. (Bath, Dundee, Kent,
Leicester, Oxford, and Southampton)
and the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory (PNNL). It originated in
a workshop convened by the U.K.’s
Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC). The
purpose of the project is to provide
intelligence and law-enforcement
services with a greatly enhanced ability
to identify, and attribute information
to, individuals and groups in both
real and cyber domains. SID deviates
from existing approaches in that the
work incorporates contributions from
an expansive spectrum of scientific
domains, including biometric,
psychological, behavioral, and online
indicators of identity, enabling a broader
set of identity measures to be considered
than ever before.
The SID project offers an
innovative and exciting new approach
to the concept of identity. The
assumption is that while there may
be many dimensions to an identity—
some more stable than others—all
should ultimately refer back to a
single core identity, or SuperIdentity.
SID takes this approach further
than any existing work by including
static and behavioral measures from
both the real world and the cyber
world. The obvious consequence is
that identification is improved by the
combination of measures.
SID provides two capabilities that
are entirely unique. First, the project
offers an identity framework through
which associations can be derived
between different identity measures.
The value of these associations is that
known pieces of information may then
be used to predict previously unknown
pieces of information. Second, the
project offers the capacity to quantify
the certainty associated with an
identification decision. This enables the
end user to have a level of confidence
(or risk) in their decision, and to make
a judgment as to whether additional
information is required. The objectives
of the project are:
• to combine identity measures
across real and cyber domains to inform
identification decisions in the face of