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

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: UM
• Authors: Rosta Farzan, Peter Brusilovsky
• Keywords: Ever-changing Information Space, Information Seeking Behavior, Programming Languages, Social Navigation Support, UM 2009