In the past four years, we have worked with several research programs that were developing intelligent software for use by intelligence analysts. Our involvement in these programs was to develop the metrics and methodologies for assessing the impact on users; in this case, on intelligence analysts. In particular, we focused on metrics to evaluate how much the intelligent systems contribute to the users’ tasks and what the cost is to the user in terms of workload and process deviations. In this paper, we describe the approach used. We started with two types of preliminary investigations – first, collecting and analyzing data from analysts working in an instrumented environment for a period of 2 years, and second, developing and conducting formative evaluations of research software. The long-term studies informed our ideas about the processes that analysts use and provided potential metrics in an environment without intelligent software tools. The formative evaluations helped us to define sets of application-specific metrics. Finally, we conducted assessments during and after technology insertions. We describe the metrics and methodologies used in each of these activities, along with the lessons learned.

This paper introduces an evaluation method that provides the capability of comparing results of like-structured evaluations that occur over time and with changing toolsets or environmental conditions. This makes use of the framework ideal for comparison of collaboration tools. The framework helps to structure evaluations by mapping system goals to evaluation objectives, metrics, and measures. The upper-most levels of the framework are conceptual in nature, while the bottom level is implementation-specific, i.e., evaluation-specific. Careful attention during construction of the conceptual elements for an evaluation template allows for its reuse in a series of like-structured evaluations and comparison of those results.

Many researchers believe that groupware can only be evaluated by studying real collaborators in their real contexts, a process that tends to be expensive and time-consuming. Others believe that it is more practical to evaluate groupware through usability inspection methods. Deciding between these two approaches is difficult, because it is unclear how they compare in a real evaluation situation. To address this problem, we carried out a dual evaluation of a groupware system, with one evaluation applying user-based techniques, and the other using inspection methods. We compared the results from the two evaluations and concluded that, while the two methods have their own strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs, they are complementary. Because the two methods found overlapping problems, we expect that they can be used in tandem to good effect, e.g., applying the discount method prior to a field study, with the expectation that the system deployed in the more expensive field study has a better chance of doing well because some pertinent usability problems will have already been addressed.