Does tailoring help people find the information they need?
Nathalie Colineau, Cécile L. Paris · New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia · 2009
In this paper, we present an empirical study assessing the impact of tailoring on information-seeking tasks. Our aim was to evaluate whether providing tailored information would help people find the information they need more quickly and accurately. Our results show that tailored documents have an impact on information-seeking, at least when the information to be found is spread over a number of sources and needs to be synthesised. With documents tailored to their needs, people can find the information they seek more quickly, and overall, more accurately. In our study, we also investigated how people looked for information to gain a better understanding of the strategies employed by people to find information.