The effects of perceived chronic pressure and time constraint on information search behaviors and experience

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2019.04.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • High-pressure searchers had more search efforts than low-pressure searchers, especially when there was no time constraint.

  • Individual's perceived chronic pressure often exert significant effects on searchers’ behaviors when there was no time constraint.

  • Searchers’ reading speed was found to be significantly influenced by the interaction of time condition, searchers’ chronic pressure and search tasks.

  • Relative importance of time constraint and individual’s perceived chronic pressure on searchers’ behaviors and experiences deserves further research.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the effects of individual pressure level and time constraint on searchers' behaviors and their assessment of search experience within the framework of interactive information retrieval. A user experiment was conducted in which 40 participants individually searched for information in a laboratory setting under two conditions: with time constraint (TC) and with no time constraint (NTC). Participants filled in a Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire to measure their chronic pressure value (subjective stress), and their pressure value was recorded as their individual characteristic. The results showed that the more chronic pressure the searcher has, the more search efforts they devote, including more time in searching and more time to complete the search tasks, especially when there was no time constraint. Time constraint and searchers’ pressure value had a significant effect on users’ numbers of scrolling actions per minute. The results indicate that when given a time constraint, searchers with higher-pressure values tend to lower their reading or scanning speed, while searchers with lower-pressure values tend to accelerate their reading or scanning speed. The results suggested different people would react to the time condition change in different ways, especially people with higher pressure. Therefore, it is necessary to examine users’ search behaviors in person-in-situation frameworks to analyze the effects of contextual factors on users. This study contributes to our knowledge of how contextual factors and individual characteristics affect searchers’ behaviors and have implications for the design of IIR systems.

Introduction

User experience has long been an important consideration in the design of interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems. To provide users with more effective and efficient search service, users’ individual characteristics and search contexts are critical for information retrieval systems. For instance, in a review of the historical development of IIR, it is recognized that searchers’ characteristics, conceptualized as levels of user expertise and behavioral characteristics inherent in searchers, should be specifically considered in the feedback that IR systems provide for users (Savage-Knepshield & Belkin, 1999). Recent research on this topic has focused on the attributes of searchers, such as users’ domain knowledge, search skills, cognitive styles and types of search tasks, and how they influence users’ information search behaviors (e.g., Liu, Thomas, Bacic, Gedeon, & Li, 2017; Liu and Wacholder, 2017, O'Brien et al., 2017, Wittek et al., 2016).

More generally, the variable of time has been conceptualized as a contextual factor and constraints that affect people's information seeking behavior and decision-making (Landry, 2014, Savolainen, 2006, Wegier and Spaniol, 2015). When the available time is limited, users may change their information seeking strategies or behaviors over their information search processes. In the conceptualization of search tasks, Li and Belkin (2008) proposed to examine time length as a feature of search tasks, and urgency as a subjective measure of searchers’ characteristics. This thread of research suggests that IIR research should examine the effect of time constraints on user search behaviors and how users perceive their overall search experience within information seeking contexts.

IIR researchers have investigated the effect of imposed time constraint on user perceptions, search behaviors and search performance during information seeking processes (e.g., Crescenzi et al., 2015, Fujikawa et al., 2012; Liu & Wei, 2016; Liu, Yang, Zhao, Jiang, & Zhang, 2014). These studies generally suggest that time constraints affect users’ perceptions about their search experiences and search behaviors during information seeking processes. For example, time pressure has a significant effect on the evaluation of search performance (Liu et al., 2014) and user search behaviors (Crescenzi et al., 2015), such as the query rate and the number of documents viewed per query. However, when given a time constraint, whether different individuals would have different coping strategies during the information search process remains unclear.

When analyzing users’ search behaviors, Allen and Kim (2001) have proposed the adoption of a person-in-situation approach to understanding human information behaviors by taking account of the interaction effects of individual characteristics and situational factors. Kim and Allen (2002) also demonstrated that the combination of the task type and problem-solving style/cognitive ability variables had significant interaction effects on users’ search activities. Therefore, when examining the effect of contextual factors, it is important to consider users’ individual characteristics, especially the personality/cognitive style variables, to investigate how different users cope in different search situations.

One possible characteristic that may influence users’ interactions under different time conditions is their individual pressure. Research on pressure and stress suggests that individual pressure could be classified as chronic pressure and acute pressure (Petrac, Bedwell, Renk, Orem, & Sims, 2009). Acute pressure is seen as healthy and adaptive responding to the environment, often caused by contextual factors such as time constraints. Chronic pressure is constant and persists over an extended period of time, which can be referred to as an internal individual characteristic (Lundberg, 2005, Selye, 1973). Comparing types of pressure, acute pressure is a reaction to recent events or immediate surroundings, such as a time constraint, whereas chronic pressure describes individual pressure levels that may not change during a period of time. Studies have shown that chronic pressure is related to people's academic performance and tasks of attention (e.g., Aspinwall and Taylor, 1992, Elias et al., 2011, Simons et al., 2002, Vedhara et al., 2000). However, it is unclear how the chronic pressure level as an individual characteristic will affect users’ search behaviors, particularly when a certain time constraint is imposed. The relationship between the individual characteristic of chronic pressure level and time constraints needs further investigation, because searchers may have different coping strategies in different situations. We specifically consider how users with different chronic pressure levels will accomplish search tasks, especially when a certain time constraint is imposed. We examined such research questions using a mixed-effects model method to not only examine the main effects of time conditions and users’ chronic pressure, but also the interaction effects of these two factors.

The contributions of this paper include: First, our study examines the effect of users’ chronic pressure value on their search behaviors and search effort, and the results indicate that more chronic pressure could lead to significantly more search efforts; second, the results help us understand how different people behave to cope with situational change, such as a time constraint; third, the study also sheds light on the design of interactive information retrieval, especially the mixed model method could be provided as the data analysis method for us to examine the effects of task and user and other variables together.

Section snippets

Research objectives

This study was designed to determine the interaction effects of perceived chronic pressure and time constraint on searchers' behaviors and their assessment of search experience within the person-in-situation framework of interactive information retrieval. We focus on chronic pressure as one kind of individual characteristic, and use pressure to indicate the user experience of stress, measured by internal perceptions of an individual, as opposed to the broader definition of stress which is

Person-in-situation approach

The person-in-situation theory posits that intelligence, reasoning and problem solving are situated and personal, and they should be interpreted as in the person-situation interaction, not the person alone or the situation alone (Snow, 1994). Allen (1997) proposed a person-in-situation approach in information science and advocated for an interactionist perspective on the relationship between situational and individual determinants of behavior. From the interactionist perspective, users’

Methodology

Drawing from the theoretical model of person-in-situation, a laboratory-based user experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of time constraint and perceived chronic pressure on users’ search behaviors and perception of search experience. A lab-based user experiment was selected because the goal of this study is to examine how different users react to the same level of time constraint, therefore a lab experiment could help us control that all the participants were searching for the

Data analysis

In this study, mixed-effects models are constructed for determining the effects of pressure value and time condition on user search behaviors. Mixed-effects distinguish between fixed effects that are due to experimental conditions, and random effects that are due to individual differences in a sample. We are concerned with both fixed effects of pressure value and time condition and random effects of individual differences. We choose mixed-effects models because they are useful for the analysis

Results

Table 3 presents the results from the mixed effects of pressure value and time condition on the time spent in searching. Our null model included the random effects of search task and user, as shown in Table 2. The fixed effects of pressure value, time condition and their interaction effects were added to other models.

Table 4 presents the results from the mixed effects of pressure value and time condition on the behavioral variables we examined the study. The results indicated that three

Discussion

This study adopted a person-in-situation framework to investigate the effects of time constraint on users’ search behaviors by considering users’ perceived chronic pressure as an individual characteristic. Our findings suggest that both perceived chronic pressure and time constraints have significant effects on users’ search behaviors, and these two factors have interaction effects on users’ search behaviors.

First, our results show that searchers with higher perceived chronic pressure spent

Limitation and future research

Our study has some limitations. As a laboratory experiment, participants’ search behavior observed in the lab may not be the same as in naturalistic settings. Particularly for the time constraint, we manipulated the time constraint as a five-minute limit for each of the search tasks in our settings, which was only about half of the required time in the pilot study. The reason we set a five-minute limit was to ensure that participants experience a severe time constraint in searching, since some

Implications

The findings of the current study indicate that users with higher-pressure may need more assistance than users with lower-pressure, since they often need longer time and more interactions to accomplish search tasks. Further investigation should explore the effects of time constraint and individual's chronic pressure on users’ search strategies, their interaction on Web pages, evaluation criteria for the usefulness of information during search, and their search performance. The results also shed

Conclusion

This study demonstrated that both time constraint and pressure level had a remarkable influence upon searchers’ search behaviors. Searchers’ perceived chronic pressure influenced searchers’ task completion time, searching time and number of interactions during search. Compared to searchers with low-pressure, searchers with high-pressure tended to be more active during search, devoted a longer time to search, and took a longer time to accomplish tasks. However, searchers’ chronic pressure was

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by The National Social Science Fund of China (project number 18BTQ090) and partially by Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number LP140100995).

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