TCDL Bulletin
Current 2005
Volume 2   Issue 1

Jeonghyun Kim
SCILS
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA
<anniekim@scils.rutgers.edu>

This is becoming an axiom: information systems should be designed to support users' tasks. Congruently, task-oriented interaction or task-based design and analysis are applied to digital libraries. This is because the type of task that needs to be done is generally considered to play an important role in the user's system interaction. Task difficulty is one of the task characteristics that influences the way a user approaches information seeking.

However, relatively little research has focused on task difficulty relative to a user's perception and judgment. Thus, this study focused on task difficulty with regards to personal perception. The study investigated how task difficulty is related to searching performance in terms of time spent, pages viewed, pages saved, search efficiency, and the number of query reformulations. It assumed that a task predicted to be difficult would require a higher level of user engagement and work during a search. If users invested significant effort to complete a certain task, the task would thus be assessed as difficult.

The results of the study show that expected difficulty is a good predictor for search efficiency. It also revealed that search efficiency is a great indicator for experienced difficulty. In addition, it was found that judgment of both expected difficulty and experienced difficulty varies according to the type of search task: factual task, interpretive task, or exploratory task.

For a larger view of Figure 1, click here.

For a larger view of Figure 2, click here.

For a larger view of Figure 3, click here.

© Copyright 2005 Jeonghyun Kim
Some or all of these materials were previously published in the Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital libraries, ACM 1-58113-876-8/05/0006.

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