A Sensemaking Interface for Doctors’ Learning at Work:

A Co-Design Study Using a Paper Prototype

Vladimir Tomberg, Mohammad Al-Smadi, Tamsin Treasure-Jones, Tobias Ley

Learning at the Workplace

• No time to reflect• No time to learn about experiences • High workload of general practitioners • A lot of the valuable experiences get lost, if

the doctors are not remembered or reflected upon

Supporting Sensemaking in Informal Learning

• Informal learning is episodic in nature• Episodes of learning experiences are stored in

episodic memory • Mental categorization requires: – foraging (information seeking, finding, and collecting)– sensemaking (building representations and

interpreting information) • Up-to-date systems do not focus on retrieving

experiences from episodic memory

A Design for Supporting Memory Retrieval and Sensemaking

• The main support mechanisms in the episodic and semantic memory systems need to be considered

• Contextual cues (time, place, tags) need to be represented in the interface to access past episodes from episodic memory

• Categorization and enrichment happen in semantic memory in which the episodes are connected

Timeline for Episodic and Sorting for Semantic Memory

Map for Episodic and Layered Model for Semantic Memory

Tag Cloud for Episodic and Concept Map for Semantic Memory

Participatory Co-design Using a Paper Prototype

• The paper prototype has been used in a series of co-design meetings over several months in order to generate and validate initial ideas

• The series have been held with clinical staff from two medical practices: 2 GPs and 2 Diabetic Specialist Nurses (DSN) and 2 Health Care Assistants (HCA)

Functionality that was considered to be particularly useful

• The timeline view• The collections

visualization• The tag cloud view• The links view. • Participants saw the

tool as offering support at both an individual and organizational level

Possible Risks Found• Participants would not

do anything else with the material. For this reason they suggested that one should be prompted to identify actions/tasks for themselves (and colleagues) related to the material/bits they are working with

Conclusion

• The general architecture of the interface is perceived to be effective

• Healthcare professionals prefer time and topic cues rather than location cues

• The suggestion for reminders also suggests that memory processes offer a suitable conceptualization for their informal learning needs

Future Work

• To investigate the important collaborative aspects which have come out from the initial feedback: – providing agreed categories and structures– visualizing tags others have used– sharing material and sensemaking tasks with

colleagues • We will particularly focus on how this collective

knowledge influences individual sensemaking