APPLYING USER-CENTERED
DESIGN TECHNIQUES
Our work at PNNL is focused on the
third part of the project, exploration
of patterns and templates in SID. We
started work early in the project to
collect use cases from envisioned end
users, primarily intelligence analysts
and law enforcement officers. We
conducted 19 unclassified interviews
with participants to understand their
work in identifying individuals.
We asked some basic questions such as:
• What is your job title? Your
responsibilities?
• How long you have worked in this
role?
• On a normal day, what types of tasks
do you do?
• What percentage of these tasks
involves some sort of identification of
individuals?
• Who are the other people you work
with? In what capacity?
• How many people work in a role
similar to yours?
• What types of technology are used
in your work?
• How is success measured? By you?
By the organization?
partial and changing knowledge and
uncertainty;
• to uncover hidden data and
relationships between data that can
contribute to informed decisions about
identity; and
• to quantify the certainty of an
identification by quantifying the
reliability of each contributing measure.
The research to achieve these
objectives is broken into three parts,
each with several tasks. The first part
is to create the factors of interest
in identification and to create the
SuperIdentity model. Tasks include
reviewing identity aspects in the real
world and cyber domains, both slow-
changing and behavioral; creating a
generic model of these aspects and their
relationships; and determining the
social, legal, and ethical acceptability of
the use of these identity aspects in both
the U. K. and the U. S.
The second part is to establish
salience and certainty across contexts.
The tasks here are to create baselines
and variances for different aspects of
identification and to determine the
accuracy of human and computer
identification of real-world and cyber
factors of behavior.
The third part of the project is to
explore patterns and templates within
SID. To accomplish this, use cases
have been collected and are currently
being used in the development of a
visualization tool for exploring the
model. The visualizations, along with
SID data, will be used later this year in
evaluating the utility of the SID project.
Eventually, customized tools may be
developed for specific groups of end
users who need to identify individuals
for transactions, law enforcement, or
other security-related uses.
The sidebar shows the focus of
work going at the various universities.
More information is available on the
SuperIdentity website (http://www.
southampton.ac.uk/superidentity/).
UCD work is helping
project researchers
understand how
intelligence analysts
currently work.
Figure 1. An image describing the SuperIdentity research.
