Understanding and Supporting Sensemaking in Collaborative Web Search

While there has been some research on sensemaking in individual information seeking, there is little understanding of sensemaking in collaborative information seeking tasks, such as collaborative Web search. We conducted a study of
users’ sensemaking in collaborative Web search tasks performed using SearchTogether. Based on findings of this study, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a tool, CoSense, to enhance sensemaking for collaborative search tasks. The results of our evaluation of CoSense provide insight into how people collaboratively make sense of information and what design features can help them.