Task has been recognized as an influential factor in information seeking behavior. An increasing
number of studies are concentrating on the specific characteristics of the task as independent variables
to explain associated information-seeking activities. This paper examines the relationships between
operational measures of information search behavior, subjectively perceived post-task difficulty and
objective task complexity in the context of factual information-seeking tasks on the web. A questiondriven,
web-based information-finding study was conducted in a controlled experimental setting. The
study participants performed nine search tasks of varying complexity. Subjective task difficulty was
found to be correlated with many measures that characterize the searcherâ s activities. Four of those
measures, the number of the unique web pages visited, the time spent on each page, the degree of
deviation from the optimal path and the degree of the navigation pathâ s linearity, were found to be good
predictors of subjective task difficulty. Objective task complexity was found to affect the relative
importance of those predictors and to affect subjective assessment of task difficulty.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/106061 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Gwizdka, Jacek, Spence, Ian |
| Publisher | American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Conference Paper |
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