Search Behaviors
vertical search, shopping, jobs, travel, yahoo, 2007, Indian users, strategies, behaviors
Project details
This was my design thesis project for my design diploma at NID and was sponsored by Yahoo!. Most of what I have done in Yahoo! on this topic cannot be disclosed due to NDA. But speaking broadly, I worked on finding common search behaviors in specialized searches like shopping, travel and job hunt. Data were collected by in context think aloud protocol in which the participants were asked to perform a shopping/job/travel search task that they are already involved in. That is, the search task was ensured to be a compelled one by asking the participant to carry on with their current online search projects. For example, if participant X was looking to buy a hard drive or is looking for a job in IT field or planning a weekend trip to Coorg that was what the task comprised of. This enabled us to see search as carried forward in the real information space of the participants. We observed 16 participants do 2 tasks each. The think aloud data was analyzed and coded for themes, identifying strategies and behaviors as exhibited by novices, intermediates and experts.
Continuing my interest in Search following are some of the classroom projects done at UW:
Reading recommendation: The goal of this project was to create a reading recommendation of empirical articles for a defined audience in a research topic of our interest.
The audiences of this reading recommendation are students or researcher who are looking for an introduction to empirical research in Information Seeking Behaviors. This reading recommendation provides a summary of the articles recommended and motivations for the reader to further explore the articles and themes recommended.
Looking for some of the key themes and people in this research, I identified 3 articles that showed the shift in way the research area is progressing. Broder(2002) establishes the shift from search need to be only Informational to Informational, Navigational and Transactional. Teevan et al. (2004) establishes the shift from thinking of Information Seeking to be only search(querying) to search and orienteering(navigating in small steps). Evans et al. (2009) probes into Information seeking as a social activity shifting beyond individual.
I learned to identify themes, key people and to get a sense of how, a research topic is trending. This an essential skill that will help me both as a designer and researcher to stay current with areas of my interest. This project helped me reflect actively on these aspects as I looked back into an area which has been a long term interest of mine: Information behaviors. Also writing a professionally persuasive reading recommendation helped me communicate precisely while creating a motivation for the audience to peruse the articles.
General or Vertical search?: The goal is to examine the relationship between theory, hypothesis testing, experimental designs, modes of observation, sampling, validity, data analysis and interpretation.
To learn these concepts hands on, we had a research paper writing exercise. For this, I wrote this paper that presents a hypothetical research study based on fake data.
This paper discusses a study that investigates effect of search type (general, vertical), user’s domain expertise (novice, expert) and user’s search expertise (novice, expert) on search strategies used like tele-porting, orienteering, task completion. We used a think-aloud protocol to analyze different search strategies. Results reflect that vertical search helps novices in search leap over the barriers of expertise in search.
People
- At Yahoo!:
- Sumanth Vepa
- Anupama Kamath
- Course Instructors at UW:
- Jan Spyridakis (Research theory)
- Jennifer Turns (Empirical traditions)
- Pallavi Damera
Course Page
Artifacts
- Reading recommendation
- General or vertical search: Paper, Presentation (this is a mock research paper written based on fake data)
- Fake data