Sensemaking for the rest of us

Sensemaking is simple—it’s the way people go about their process of collecting, organizing and creating representations of complex information sets, all centered around some problem they need to understand. While there are a number of tools and systems to support sensemakers, the largest group of users—people who are not highly technical—might be left out of the sensemaking tool space by our field’s focus on extremely high-end visualizations and tools. In a series of studies we looked at the effect of tools on different sensemaking processes, finding that for many sensemaking jobs, complex tools and advanced representational constructs don’t actually seem to help, but can hinder the process of sensemaking. Author Keywords Sensemaking, notetaking, notebook, spreadsheets