Journal of Documentation

Purpose – This research aims to identify some requirements for supporting user interactions with electronic current-awareness alert systems based on data from a professional work environment.

Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative data were gathered using contextual inquiry observations with 21 workers at the London office of an international law firm. The analysis uses CASSM (“Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits”), a usability evaluation method structured around identifying mismatches, or “misfits”, between user-concepts and concepts represented within a system.

Findings – Participants were frequently overwhelmed by e-mail alerts, and a key requirement is to support efficient interaction. Several misfits, which act as barriers to efficient reviewing and follow-on activities, are demonstrated. These relate to a lack of representation of key user-concepts at the interface and/or within the system, including alert items and their properties, source documents, “back-story”, primary sources, content categorisations and user collections.

Research limitations/implications – Given these misfits, a set of requirements is derived to improve the efficiency with which users can achieve key outcomes with current-awareness information as these occur within a professional work environment.

Originality/value – The findings will be of interest to current-awareness providers. The approach is relevant to information interaction researchers interested in deriving design requirements from naturalistic studies.