Melanie Kellar

Previous studies have examined various aspects of user behavior on the Web, including general information‐seeking patterns, search engine use, and revisitation habits. Little research has been conducted to study how users navigate and interact with their Web browser across different information‐seeking tasks. We have conducted a field study of 21 participants, in which we logged detailed Web usage and asked participants to provide task categorizations of their Web usage based on the following categories: Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Browsing, and Transactions. We used implicit measures logged during each task session to provide usage measures such as dwell time, number of pages viewed, and the use of specific browser navigation mechanisms. We also report on differences in how participants interacted with their Web browser across the range of information‐seeking tasks. Within each type of task, we found several distinguishing characteristics. In particular, Information Gathering tasks were the most complex; participants spent more time completing this task, viewed more pages, and used the Web browser functions most heavily during this task. The results of this analysis have been used to provide implications for future support of information seeking on the Web as well as direction for future research in this area.

While previous work has shown that monitoring is an emerging web activity, we have very little understanding of how users actually engage in monitoring on the Web. That is, how users complete their monitoring activities and the types of information being monitored. In this poster, we discuss the role of monitoring and present a study currently underway to further examine the role of monitoring on the Web.

Motivation is one of the driving forces behind the recent interest in games with educational goals. People willingly play complex games and we would like to channel that willingness to participate in complex challenges into the educational context. In this paper, we report on a survey administered to computer science and business students, two distinct groups of game players, in order to examine the role of motivation in electronic games. The results of the survey are presented, including a gaming profile of each group, as well as a series of design suggestions for educational games and activities that are based on these results.

Information Filtering systems learn user preferences either through explicit or implicit feedback. However, requiring users to explicitly rate items as part of the interface interaction can place a large burden on the user. Implicit feedback removes the burden of explicit user ratings by transparently monitoring user behavior such as time spent reading, mouse movements and scrolling behavior. Previous research has shown that task may have an impact on the effectiveness of some implicit measures. In this work we report both qualitative and quantitative results of an initial study examining the relationship between user time spent reading and relevance for three web search tasks: relevance judgment, simple question answering and complex question answering. This study indicates that the usefulness of time spent as a measure of user interest is related to task and is more useful for more complex web search tasks. Future directions for this research are presented.