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Effect of Time Constraint and Task Type on Search Experience |
Liu Chang, Zhang Lu |
Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China |
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Abstract [Objective] This paper investigates the differences of users' search experience between two types of tasks, with and without time constraint, with the goal to understand how various contextual factors influence search behaviors and experience. [Methods] A user experiment is conducted, in which 40 undergraduate students participated, to search for two types of search tasks: Fact Finding (FF) and Information Understanding (IU), under two time conditions: with time constraint, and without time constraint. [Results] The results show that time constraint significantly shorten users' search time, writing time, and the amount of information produced in the notebook, and their new knowledge acquisition; in addition, users speed up the number of words produced in the documents. With respect to the task type effect, users' ratio of time on search and writing, the number of words produced on documents during search are not significantly influenced by task type, no matter whether there is time constraint or not. Very interestingly, when there is no time constraint, users spend longer time to complete the task, longer time on searching to accomplish IU tasks; however, there is no significant difference on the amount of information collected and the level of new knowledge acquisition. When there is time constraint, comparing with FF tasks, users collect more information but think they acquire lower level of new knowledge. [Limitations] This study is conducted in a lab environment, and the time constraint is manipulated by experimenters, which may not be the same as it is in real settings, so the results of this study may not be generalizable to various conditions. [Conclusions] This study has implications for understanding how time and search task type influence search behaviors for information search research.
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Received: 02 March 2015
Published: 06 April 2016
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