Beyond Searching: Understanding How People Use Search to Support Their Creative Endeavors

Creativity is an essential part of people's daily life and work across a range of everyday tasks. However, little prior work has explored how people use search engines and information resources as part of their creative processes, and how systems might better support users' information needs when working on tasks that involve creative endeavors. In this dissertation research, I sought to investigate the types of information seeking tools and strategies that people currently use in practice when they engage in projects that involve everyday creativity. The dissertation includes two parts. In the first part, an online survey with 175 participants was conducted to get a general understanding of how people use search engines and other existing information tools to support their everyday creativity tasks, the types of creative process stages that are involved in their tasks, and how they use different tools to support different creative stages. To get a deeper understanding of people's behaviors and their creative processes, in the second part, I conducted a two-week diary study to investigate users' in-situ search behaviors in their design-related projects from different perspectives (e.g., types of information sought in a project, intents to use the information found online, strategies of using different resources or tools in creative processes, and challenges encountered in creative processes). At the end of this dissertation, I discuss the implications of this research and provide recommendations for future research and the future design of search systems.Doctor of Philosoph