Investigating Professional Analyst Strategies in Immersive Space to Think

Existing research on sensemaking in immersive analytics systems primarily focuses on understanding how users complete analysis within these systems with quantitative and qualitative datasets. However, these user studies mainly concentrate on understanding analysis styles and methodologies from a predominantly novice user study population. While this approach provides excellent initial insights into what users may do within IA systems, it fails to address how professionals may utilize an immersive analytic system for analysis tasks. In our work, we build upon an existing immersive analytics concept - “Immersive Space to Think” to understand how professional user populations differ from novice users in immersive analytic system usage. We conducted a user study with 11 professional intelligence analysts who completed three analysis sessions each. Using our results from this study, we provide deep analysis into how professional users complete sensemaking within immersive analytic systems, compare our findings to previously published findings with a novice user population, and provide insights into how to develop better IA systems to support the professional analyst's strategies within these systems.