The Sandbox for analysis: concepts and methods

  • Authors:
  • William Wright;David Schroh;Pascale Proulx;Alex Skaburskis;Brian Cort

  • Affiliations:
  • Oculus Info Inc.;Oculus Info Inc.;Oculus Info Inc.;Oculus Info Inc.;Oculus Info Inc.

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The Sandbox is a flexible and expressive thinking environment that supports both ad-hoc and more formal analytical tasks. It is the evidence marshalling and sense-making component for the analytical software environment called nSpace. This paper presents innovative Sandbox human information interaction capabilities and the rationale underlying them including direct observations of analysis work as well as structured interviews. Key capabilities for the Sandbox include "put-this-there" cognition, automatic process model templates, gestures for the fluid expression of thought, assertions with evidence and scalability mechanisms to support larger analysis tasks. The Sandbox integrates advanced computational linguistic functions using a Web Services interface and protocol. An independent third party evaluation experiment with the Sandbox has been completed. The experiment showed that analyst subjects using the Sandbox did higher quality analysis in less time than with standard tools. Usability test results indicated the analysts became proficient in using the Sandbox with three hours of training.