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