Users adopt Two Stage Process to refind Web Material

Robert G. Capra and Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones of Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science have been studying the problem of how people re-find information.

They say that how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they have found is not well understood, by contrast with the now considerable research into how people find things in the first place.

They've produced a paper on how people re-find and re-use information, giving results and observations from a controlled, laboratory study of refinding information found on the Web.

The study was conducted as a collaborative exercise with pairs of participants. One participant acted as a retriever, helping the other participant re-find information by telephone. This design allowed insight into the strategies that users employed to re-find information, and into how domain artifacts and contextual information were used to aid the re-finding process. Users could also add their own artifacts in the form of making annotations on the web pages they viewed.

They find that re-finding often occurs as a two stage, iterative process in which users first attempt to locate an information source (search), and once found, begin a process to find the specific information being sought (browse). Our findings are consistent with research on waypoints; orienteering approaches to re-finding; and navigation of electronic spaces. Furthermore, we observed that annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.

An interesting synopsis and critique can be found at TRN, where Marti Hearst, an associate professor of information management and systems at the University of California at Berkeley gives her opinion:

'There are two design and analysis flaws in the study, however, said Hearst. The users' are explicitly told that they will be asked to find information again, and the study assumes that people will instruct others to find something in the same way that they would on their own, she said. "It could well be the case that people... break it down into pieces to better help the other person keep track of the different aspects of a task."'

The paper itself can be accessed from the website below.

Associated Link: Full paper link

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