4,671 research outputs found
Characterizing Search Behavior in Productivity Software
Complex software applications expose hundreds of commands to users through intricate menu hierarchies. One of the most popular productivity software suites, Microsoft Office, has recently developed functionality that allows users to issue free-form text queries to a search system to quickly find commands they want to execute, retrieve help documentation or access web results in a unified interface. In this paper, we analyze millions of search sessions originating from within Microsoft Office applications, collected over one month of activity, in an effort to characterize search behavior in productivity software. Our research brings together previous efforts in analyzing command usage in large-scale applications and efforts in understanding search behavior in environments other than the web. Our findings show that users engage primarily in command search, and that re-accessing commands through search is a frequent behavior. Our work represents the first large-scale analysis of search over command spaces and is an important first step in understanding how search systems integrated with productivity software can be successfully developed
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This is what I'm doing and why: reflections on a think-aloud study of digital library users' information behaviour
Many user-centred studies of digital libraries include a think-aloud element – where users are asked to verbalise their thoughts, interface actions and sometimes their feelings whilst using digital libraries to help them complete one or more information tasks. These studies are usually conducted with the purpose of identifying usability issues related to the system(s) used or understanding aspects of users‟ information behaviour. However, few of these studies present detailed accounts of how their think-aloud data was collected and analysed or provide detailed reflection on their methodologies. In this paper, we discuss and reflect on the decisions made when planning and conducting a think-aloud study of lawyers‟ interactive information behaviour. Our discussion is framed by Blandford et al.‟s PRET A Rapporter („ready to report‟) framework – a framework that can be used to plan, conduct and describe user-centred studies of digital library use from an information work perspective
Relating Web pages to enable information-gathering tasks
We argue that relationships between Web pages are functions of the user's
intent. We identify a class of Web tasks - information-gathering - that can be
facilitated by a search engine that provides links to pages which are related
to the page the user is currently viewing. We define three kinds of intentional
relationships that correspond to whether the user is a) seeking sources of
information, b) reading pages which provide information, or c) surfing through
pages as part of an extended information-gathering process. We show that these
three relationships can be productively mined using a combination of textual
and link information and provide three scoring mechanisms that correspond to
them: {\em SeekRel}, {\em FactRel} and {\em SurfRel}. These scoring mechanisms
incorporate both textual and link information. We build a set of capacitated
subnetworks - each corresponding to a particular keyword - that mirror the
interconnection structure of the World Wide Web. The scores are computed by
computing flows on these subnetworks. The capacities of the links are derived
from the {\em hub} and {\em authority} values of the nodes they connect,
following the work of Kleinberg (1998) on assigning authority to pages in
hyperlinked environments. We evaluated our scoring mechanism by running
experiments on four data sets taken from the Web. We present user evaluations
of the relevance of the top results returned by our scoring mechanisms and
compare those to the top results returned by Google's Similar Pages feature,
and the {\em Companion} algorithm proposed by Dean and Henzinger (1999).Comment: In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 200
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We are the Change that we Seek: Information Interactions During a Change of Viewpoint
There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation
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