Understanding
how Search Interfaces Shape Behavior
Dr. Diane Kelly, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
It has been well
documented that when people search for information online they
typically submit short queries and only view a small number of
search results. It is generally accepted that this is the
‘natural,’ ‘optimal’ and ‘easiest’ way for people to search
and that, in general, faster is better. In this talk, I
explore the idea that contemporary search interfaces have
conditioned people to engage in these types of search
strategies and that these strategies might not always lead to
the best results. I will present results from a recent study
that compared three search interfaces that varied according to
the amount of cost required to query, where cost was
operationalized as time. Our results show that people who used
the interface that was the most costly to query submitted
fewer queries, spent more time generating their initial
queries and viewing search results pages, examined more
documents per query, and went to greater depths in the search
results list. These people were also more successful and less
frustrated: they saved more relevant documents, reported lower
mental and temporal demands, rated their queries as more
successful and reported less frustration than people who used
a standard search interface. Our results suggest that query
facilities that are designed to encourage people to slow down
and submit a small number of well-planned queries can
potentially lead them to engage in search behaviors that are
associated with less mental and temporal demands and better
performance.
Diane Kelly is an
Associate Professor at the School of Information
and Library Science at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, USA. Her research interests are in interactive
information search and retrieval, information search behavior
and evaluation methods and metrics. Her research has been
published in several conferences and journals including ACM
SIGIR, ACM CHI, CIKM, IIiX, JCDL, Transactions on Information
Systems, Information Processing and Management, JASIST, IEEE
Computer and CACM. She teaches undergraduate and graduate
courses on research design, interactive information retrieval
and foundations of information science. She is the recipient
of two teaching awards: the 2009 ASIST/Thomson Reuters
Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award and the 2007
SILS Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. She has served on
the UNC Behavioral Institutional Review Board (IRB) since
2005. She received a Ph.D. in Information Science and a
Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers
University and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from the
University of Alabama.
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