User Interfaces for Juvenile Justice Information Systems

August 1994 - December 1996

Overview

There are two video demonstrations of this research project that are part of the 1995 Video Reports.

Sample screenshots are also available. We have been working with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services to design advanced user interfaces for an information system used by 600 employees. DJS is responsible for handling juvenile case referral for the entire state of Maryland. Our first step was to observe users, inteview users and managers, and survey 300 users with the Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction. We have refined and applied our user interface re-engineering methods to provide guidance for short-term improvements to the current system and are now turning to longer range recommendations. Our proposed interfaces use dynamic queries and starfield displays to the reveal trends and anomalies in case statistics. We are developing new techniques to visualize youth records and personal histories by showing multiple time lines with selectable markers to retrieve detailed information. For managers, we are proposing an organizational visualization tool that will allow effective navigation of large human services databases.

Video

Downloadable MPG (65 MB)

Downloadable MPG (76 MB)

Participants

Anne Rose, Faculty Research Assistant
Catherine Plaisant, Assistant Research Scientist
Ben Shneiderman, Professor Computer Science
Kent Norman, Professor Psychology
Ajit Vanniamparampil, Graduate Student College of Business
Brett Milash, Graduate Student Computer Science
Laura Slaughter, Graduate Student Psychology

Related Publications

Ellis, J., Rose, A., Plaisant, C. (Sept. 1996)
Putting visualization to work: ProgramFinder for youth placement
CHI 97 Proceedings, Atlanta GA, 22-27 March 1997, ACM New York, 502-509.

Rose, A., Ellis, J., Plaisant, C., Greene, S. (May 1996)
Life cycle of user interface techniques: The DJJ information system design process
HCIL-96-07, CS-TR-3637, CAR-TR-826

Greene, S. (May 1996)
Information and Process integration from user requirements elicitation: A case study of documents in a social services agency
Information and Process Integration in Enterprises: Rethinking Documents, Wakayama, T., et al., ed., Kluwer: Boston, 1998, 143-160. (Proceedings of IPIC '96: Information and Processes Integration Conference "Rethinking Documents", Sloan School of Management, MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 14-15, 1996.

Shneiderman, B., Rose, B. (Sept. 1995)
Social impact statements: Engaging public participation in information technology design
Proc. CQL'96, ACM SIGCAS Symposium on Computers and the Quality of Life (Feb. 1996) 90-96. Also appears in Friedman, B. (Editor), Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology, CSLI Publications and Cambridge Univ. Press (1997), 117-133.

Plaisant, C., Milash, B., Rose, A., Widoff, S., Shneiderman, B. (Sept. 1995)
Life Lines: Visualizing personal histories
ACM CHI '96 Conference Proc. (Vancouver, BC, Canada, April 13-18, 1996) 221-227, color plate 518, http://www.acm.org/sigchi/sigchi96/proceedings. The paper also has a corresponding video in the CHI 96 Video Program ACM, New York. Video also available from HCIL in the 1996 HCIL Video report.

Slaughter, L., Norman, K.L., Shneiderman, B. (March 1995)
Assessing users' subjective satisfaction with the Information System for Youth Services (ISYS)
VA Tech Proc. of Third Annual Mid-Atlantic Human Factors Conference (Blacksburg, VA, March 26-28, 1995) 164-170.

Rose, A., Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C. (Feb. 1995)
An applied ethnographic method for redesigning user interfaces
ACM Proc. of DIS 95, Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods & Techniques (Ann Arbor, MI, Aug 23-25, 1995) 115-122.