Judging a book by its cover: interface elements that affect reader selection of ebooks

Digital library research has demonstrated the impact of content presentation on both search and reading behaviours. In this paper, we scrutinise the influence of ebook presentation on user behaviour, focussing on document thumbnails and the first page view. We demonstrate that flaws in presentation increase the volume of short time-span reading, and reduce the likelihood of long-span reading when compared to other documents. This reflects other patterns of information seeking behaviour that demonstrate increased short-term reading when information content is uncertain, and suggests an ineffective use of reader time on less useful content

Book selection behavior in the physical library: implications for ebook collections

Little is known about how readers select books, whether they be print books or ebooks. In this paper we present a study of how people select physical books from academic library shelves. We use the insights gained into book selection behavior to make suggestions for the design of ebook-based digital libraries in order to better facilitate book selection behavior

Patterns of Reading and Organizing Information in Document Triage

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage

Balancing human and system visualization during document triage

People must frequently sort through and identify relevant materials from a large set of documents. Document triage is a specific form of information collecting where people quickly evaluate a large set of documents from the Internet by reading (or skimming) documents and organizing them into a personal information collection. During triage people can re-read documents, progressively refine their organization, and share results with others. People usually perform triage using multiple applications in concert: a search engine interface presents lists of potentially relevant documents; a document reader displays their content; and a text editor or a more specialized application records notes and assessments. However, people often become disoriented while switching between these subtasks in document triage. This can hinder the interaction between the subtasks and can distract people from focusing on documents of interest. To support document triage, we have developed an environment that infers users’ interests based on their interactions with multiple applications and on an analysis of the characteristics and content of the documents they are interacting with. The inferred user interest is used to relieve disorientation by generating visualizations in multiple applications that help people find documents of interest as well as interesting sections within documents

Social Influences on User Behavior in Group Information Repositories.

Group information repositories are systems for organizing and sharing files kept in a central location that all group members can access. These systems are often assumed to be tools for storage and control of files and their metadata, not tools for communication. The purpose of this research is to better understand user behavior in group information repositories, and to determine whether social factors might shape users' choices when labeling and organizing information. Through interviews with group information repository users and analysis of system log data, I found that users tend to restrict their activities in a repository to files they "own," are reluctant to delete files that could potentially be useful to others, dislike the clutter that results, and can become demotivated if no one views files they uploaded. I also conducted an online experiment in which participants labeled and organized short text files into a file-and-folder hierarchy, and later completed search tasks in the hierarchies created by others. Participants came from two intellectual communities, and were instructed to organize the files for one of three different audiences: themselves, someone from the same intellectual community, and someone from the other community. I found that when participants created hierarchies for an audience they imagined was like them, everyone searched more efficiently, regardless of whether they shared community membership with the hierarchy's creator. Further, analyses of the hierarchies showed that users performed better when file and folder labels were more similar to the text of the documents they represented. These results show that audience design, a communication process, can affect group information management tasks. The findings from both studies suggest that sharing files via a group information repository is more complicated than simply making them available on a server. Processes that affect spoken communication also impact word choices when the "interaction" is mediated by a repository. With this new knowledge, it is possible to begin design work on a new class of systems that go beyond mere storage, and better support the social aspects of user behavior in group information repositories.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64758/1/ejrader_1.pd

Patterns of Reading and Organizing Information in Document Triage ∗

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage