Task as a Context of Information Seeking: An Investigation of Daily Life Tasks on the Web
Jeonghyun Kim · Libri · 2008
This study examines how tasks influence information seeking behavior in the World Wide Web. There are three primary reasons for considering this issue: to understand the nature of people's information seeking tasks, to investigate the ways in which they attempt to execute tasks in their user-system interactions, and to facilitate the development and design of a system that serves people's task goals and supports their task-related information seeking behavior. Thirty students with backgrounds in library and information science participated in this study in a laboratory setting. Three different types of tasks were assigned. Significant differences were found in searching behavior on the Web among task types. Furthermore, the relationship of searching behavior with task difficulty, prior knowledge, and searchers' demographic characteristics varied by task types. The results suggest that information systems should be structured in ways that support users' tasks. Future study should focus on such issues and then propose how information systems and services can be tailored to the task in context.