Search engines make it easy to check facts online, but finding some specific kinds of information sometimes proves to be difficult. We studied the behavioral signals that suggest that a user is having trouble in a search task. First, we ran a lab study with 23 users to gain a preliminary understanding on how users' behavior changes when they struggle finding the information they're looking for. The observations were then tested with 179 participants who all completed an average of 22.3 tasks from a pool of 100 tasks. The large-scale study provided quantitative support for our qualitative observations from the lab study. When having difficulty in finding information, users start to formulate more diverse queries, they use advanced operators more, and they spend a longer time on the search result page as compared to the successful tasks. The results complement the existing body of research focusing on successful search strategies.

We investigated the efficacy of visual and textual web page previews in predicting the helpfulness of web pages related to a specific topic. We ran two studies in the usability lab and collected data through an online survey. Participants (total of 245) were asked to rate the expected helpfulness of a web page based on a preview (four different thumbnail variations: a textual web page summary, a thumbnail/title/URL combination, a title/URL combination). In the lab studies, the same participants also rated the helpfulness of the actual web pages themselves. In the online study, the web page ratings were collected from a separate group of participants. Our results show that thumbnails add information about the relevance of web pages that is not available in the textual summaries of web pages (title, snippet & URL). However, showing only thumbnails, with no textual information, results in poorer performance than showing only textual summaries. The prediction inaccuracy caused by textual vs. visual previews was different: textual previews tended to make users overestimate the helpfulness of web pages, whereas thumbnails made users underestimate the helpfulness of web pages in most cases. In our study, the best performance was obtained by combining sufficiently large thumbnails (at least 200x200 pixels) with page titles and URLs - and it was better to make users focus primarily on the thumbnail by placing the title and URL below the thumbnail. Our studies highlighted four key aspects that affect the performance of previews: the visual/textual mode of the previews, the zoom level and size of the thumbnail, as well as the positioning of key information elements.

The overwhelming amount of information on the web makes it critical for users to quickly and accurately evaluate the relevance of content. Here we tested whether pupil size can be used to discriminate the perceived relevance of web search results. Our findings revealed that measures of pupil size carry information that can be used to discriminate the relevance of text and image web search results, but the low signal-to-noise ratio poses challenges that need to be overcome when using this technique in naturalistic settings. Despite these challenges, our findings highlight the promise that pupillometry has as a technique that can be used to assess interest and relevance in web interaction in a non-intrusive and objective way.

Companies deploy mobile business services to enable efficient work processes and gain increases in productivity. However, the success of the services in fulfilling these goals depends on several factors from the usability of the service to its success in supporting the business processes of the companies. This paper reviews existing measures for the usability of services and measures for evaluating the effects of mobile business services on the productivity of the company. We discuss the usefulness of the existing measures in the mobile business context, where both mobility and work-context pose specific demands for the services. The review showed that existing measures rarely consider the great contextual variation caused by mobility of the services and the demands this poses on usability; which, in turn, affects productivity. To build a measurement tool that better meets the requirements of mobile business services, we completed case studies on two mobile business services, one used in passenger transport and the other in construction sites. Based on the understanding gained from the case studies, we propose a list of themes addressing both usability and productivity measures that work as the basis for a multidisciplinary measurement tool, MoBiS-Q.

Abstract Several previous studies have measured differences in the information search success of novices and experts. However, the definitions of novices and experts have varied greatly between the studies, and so have the measures used for search success. Instead of dividing the searchers into different groups based on their expertise, we chose to model search success with task completion speed , TCS. Towards this goal, 22 participants performed three fact‐finding tasks and two broader tasks in an observational user study. In our model, there were two variables related to the Web experience of the participants. Other variables included, for example, the speed of query iteration, the length of the queries, the proportion of precise queries, and the speed of evaluating result documents. Our results showed that the variables related to Web experience had expected effects on TCS. The increase in the years of Web use was related to improvement in TCS in the broader tasks, whereas the less frequent Web use was related to a decrease in TCS in the fact‐finding tasks. Other variables having significant effects on TCS in either of the task types were the speed of composing queries, the average number of query terms per query, the proportion of precise queries, and the participants' own evaluation of their search skills. In addition to the statistical models, we present several qualitative findings of the participants' search strategies. These results give valuable insight into the successful strategies in Web search beyond the previous knowledge of the expert–novice differences.

Experienced web users have strategies for information search and re-access that are not directly supported by web browsers or search engines. We studied how prevalent these strategies are and whether even experienced users have problems with searching and re-accessing information. With this aim, we conducted a survey with 236 experienced web users. The results showed that this group has frequently used key strategies (e.g., using several browser windows in parallel) that they find important, whereas some of the strategies that have been suggested in previous studies are clearly less important for them (e.g., including URLs on a webpage). In some aspects, such as query formulation, this group resembles less experienced web users. For instance, we found that most of the respondents had misconceptions about how their search engine handles queries, as well as other problems with information search and re-access. In addition to presenting the prevalence of the strategies and rationales for their use, we present concrete designs solutions and ideas for making the key strategies also available to less experienced users.

Journal Article Findex: improving search result use through automatic filtering categories Get access Mika Käki, Mika Käki * Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Kehruukoulunkatu 1, FIN-33014 Tampere, Finland * Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 3 215 6181; fax: +358 3 215 6070. E-mail addresses:[email protected] (M. Käki), [email protected] (A. Aula). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anne Aula Anne Aula Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Kehruukoulunkatu 1, FIN-33014 Tampere, Finland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 17, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 187–206, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2005.01.001 Published: 01 March 2005 Article history Received: 24 June 2004 Revision received: 06 August 2004 Accepted: 10 January 2005 Published: 01 March 2005

Eye typing provides means of communication especially for people with severe disabilities. Recent research indicates that the type of feedback impacts typing speed, error rate, and the user's need to switch her gaze between the on-screen keyboard and the typed text field. The current study focuses on the issues of feedback when a short dwell time (450 ms vs. 900 ms in a previous study) is used. Results show that the findings obtained using longer dwell times only partly apply for shorter dwell times. For example, with a short dwell time, spoken feedback results in slower text entry speed and double entry errors. A short dwell time requires sharp and clear feedback that supports the typing rhythm.