Designing exploratory search tasks for user studies of information seeking support systems

ABSTRACT

This poster describes a procedure for designing exploratory tasks for use in laboratory evaluations of information seeking interfaces. This procedure is grounded in the literature on information seeking and information retrieval and has been refined by an evaluation of four tasks designed for a study of a faceted library catalog. The procedure is intended to be extensible to generate exploratory tasks for other types of interfaces and domains.

REFERENCES

• 1: Borlund, P. (2003). The IIR evaluation model: A framework for evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems. Information Research, 8(3), paper no. 152. Retrieved February 9, 2009, from http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper152.html.
• 2: Kules, B., & Capra, R. (2008). Creating exploratory tasks for a faceted search interface. Paper presented at the Second Workshop on Human--Computer Interaction (HCIR 2008).
• 3: Ryen W. White , Bill Kules , Steven M. Drucker , m.c. schraefel, Introduction, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.4, April 2006 [doi>10.1145/1121949.1121978]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
n/a