Following others through an information maze: The impact of social navigation on information seeking behavior (original) (raw)

Social Navigation Support for Information Seeking: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

Navigating through the ever-changing information space is becoming increasingly difficult. Social navigation support is a technique for guiding users to interesting and relevant information by leveraging the browsing behavior of past users. Effect of social navigation support on users' information seeking behavior has been studied mostly from conceptual basis or under natural experiments. In the current work, we have designed and conducted a controlled experiment to investigate the effect of social navigation support through a multifaceted method. This paper reports on the design of the study and the result of log data, subjective evaluation, and eye movement data analysis.

Individual Differences in Social Navigation

2000

Social navigation has been proposed as a means to aid users to find their way through information spaces. We present an on-line grocery store that implements several different aspects of social navigation.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR SOCIAL NAVIGATION TOOLS

Social navigation is an alternative to the prevailing methods for navigating metaphors. It utilises the fact that most information navigation in the real world is performed by interaction with other people. Based on literature studies and user studies on social navigation we have developed six principles that have to be taken into consideration when designing systems for social navigation in order to make the navigational experience more efficient, qualitative and enjoyable. The principles are Integration, Trust, Presence, Privacy, Appropriateness and Personalization.

ASSIST: adaptive social support for information space traversal

2007

Abstract Finding relevant information in a hyperspace has been a much studied problem for many years. With the emergence of so called Web 2.0 technologies we have seen the use of social systems for retrieval tasks increasing dramatically. Each system collects and exploits its own pool of community wisdom for the benefit of its users. In this paper we suggest a form of retrieval which exploits the pools of wisdom of multiple social technologies, specifically social search and social navigation.

Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems

interactions

The term "navigation" conjures images of maps, compasses, and guidebooks. These may be tools we use to get around from time to time, but are they how we usually find our way? Imagine walking down a street in your hometown, trying to decide what to do. You notice a crowd ...

Social Navigation Support in E-Learning: What are the Real Footprints

Social navigation support is a new approach for helping users to find their way through complex navigation-based environments of hypermedia by following the "footprints" of other users. A significant challenge to social navigation support encounters is to construct a trail of beneficial footprints. Traditional social navigation support considers the user clicks to be "footprints." However, in our work we have found that simple click-based footprints lack information about the true intention of the users. We evaluated the benefit of considering time spent reading each page when calculating "footprints" for social navigation support. In this paper, we present a discussion of the possible problems with simple click-based footprints and the advantages of adding the measurement of time spent on pages into the footprints. We have studied this in an educational application, which helps students find relevant information in online tutorials, in the domain of Cprogramming.

Assessing the affective impact of social navigation tools in facilitating exploratory search

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010

Social navigation tools were developed with an aim to guide user exploration of an information space and to inform users' decision making processes (Dieberger, Dourish, Hook, Resnick, & Wexelblat, 2000). In the online bookstore setting, social navigation tools such as book recommendations, user tags and customer reviews address information needs not expressible with keyword search so as to facilitate exploratory activities, which may enhance subjective search experience. In order to examine whether online social navigation tools influence the affective aspects of user experience, theory of flow is applied in this study to form a new evaluation methodology. Impacts of social navigation tools on behavioral variance are also discussed.

Group Crumb: Sharing Web Navigation by Visualizing Group Traces on the Web

Although the sharing of Web navigation experiences can be useful, it is not supported by contemporary browsers. The Web has been constructed along the lines of a spatial metaphor, but with a flaw of not being able to share navigation experiences, that is, group traces, as is possible in a physical space. This paper shows that from the viewpoint of Information Foraging Theory, sharing Web navigation experiences among group members can increase their information foraging performance. To verify this, a simple prototype, the Group Crumb Prototype (GCP), has been designed. The GCP visualizes group Web traces by altering the appearance of links on a Web page according to their Group Crumb Scents, which are calculated from the recentness and times of group navigations to corresponding links. A longitudinal user study has been conducted to compare user performance and experience when surfing the Web with and without the aid of the GCP. Results show that making group navigation traces available on Web pages to group members increases their Web information foraging performance, promotes group collaboration, and enhances their Web browsing user experience as well.