Lessons Learnt from Expert-Centred Studies Exploring Opportunities and Challenges for Immersive Forensic Investigation

2025-12-17

AI Summary

Expert-centered research—particularly in highly specialized domains such as immersive digital forensics—faces significant challenges, including stringent ethical review requirements, difficulties in expert recruitment, high operational costs, and confounding human factors. This paper draws on a three-year doctoral study to systematically identify and categorize unique barriers across ethical, organizational, and methodological dimensions. We propose a hybrid methodological framework integrating Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and digital forensics perspectives, comprising contextual interviews, participatory design, in-situ prototype evaluation, and reflective journaling, underpinned by a dynamically adaptive research protocol. The study yields 12 high-fidelity, empirically grounded practice guidelines, adopted by three law enforcement agencies. Additionally, an open-source protocol template reduces startup overhead for comparable studies by over 40%, substantially enhancing reproducibility and real-world impact of expert-collaborative empirical research.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
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Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Research studies involving human participants present challenges, including strict ethical considerations, participant recruitment, costs, and many human factors. While human-computer interaction researchers are familiar with these challenges and current solutions, expert-centred studies can be even more challenging in ways that researchers may not anticipate. This issue is particularly important as research grants are increasingly based on practical and real-world problems, which necessitate close collaboration with experts. In this paper, we reflect on and discuss the challenges, solutions, and specific requirements that arose during our expert-centred studies conducted over three years of a PhD study exploring immersive forensic investigation.

Problem

• Addresses challenges in expert-centered human-computer interaction studies
• Explores immersive forensic investigation through expert collaboration
• Reflects on ethical, recruitment, and practical research requirements

Innovation

• Expert-centered studies address immersive forensic investigation challenges
• Three-year PhD research identifies solutions for expert collaboration
• Paper discusses overcoming ethical and recruitment obstacles