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Aggregated search interface preferences in multi-session search tasks

Published: 28 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Aggregated search interfaces provide users with an overview of results from various sources. Two general types of display exist: tabbed, with access to each source in a separate tab, and blended, which combines multiple sources into a single result page. Multi-session search tasks, e.g., a research project, consist of multiple stages, each with its own sub-tasks. Several factors involved in multi-session search tasks have been found to influence user search behavior. We investigate whether user preference for source presentation changes during a multi-session search task.
The dynamic nature of multi-session search tasks makes the design of a controlled experiment a non-trivial challenge. We adopt a methodology based on triangulation and conduct two types of observational study: a longitudinal study and a laboratory study. In the longitudinal study we follow the use of tabbed and blended displays by 25 students during a project.
We find that while a tabbed display is used more than a blended display, subjects repeatedly switch between displays during the project. Use of the tabbed display is motivated by a need to zoom in on a specific source, while the blended display is used to explore available material across sources whenever the information need changes.
In a laboratory study 44 students completed a multi-session search task composed of three sub-tasks, the first with a tabbed display, the second and third with blended displays. The tasks were manipulated by either providing three task about the same topic or about three different topics. We find that a stable information need over multiple sub-tasks negatively influences perceived usability of the blended displays, while we do not find an influence when the information need changes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '13: Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
July 2013
1188 pages
ISBN:9781450320344
DOI:10.1145/2484028
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 July 2013

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Author Tags

  1. aggregated search
  2. multi-session search tasks
  3. search behavior
  4. search interface preferences

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SIGIR '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 73 of 366 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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  • (2022)An Explanatory Study on User Behavior in Discovering Aggregated Multimedia Web ContentIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.317759710(56316-56330)Online publication date: 2022
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