Task complexity affects information seeking and use
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Information and information sources in tasks of varying complexity
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Display time as implicit feedback: understanding task effects
Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context (The Information Retrieval Series)
Task difficulty as a predictor and indicator of web searching interaction
CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A study on the effects of personalization and task information on implicit feedback performance
CIKM '06 Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
A field study characterizing Web-based information-seeking tasks
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
A faceted approach to conceptualizing tasks in information seeking
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Search behaviors in different task types
Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries
Personalizing information retrieval for multi-session tasks: the roles of task stage and task type
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Can search systems detect users' task difficulty?: some behavioral signals
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Implicit acquisition of context for personalization of information retrieval systems
Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Context-awareness in Retrieval and Recommendation
Search task difficulty: the expected vs. the reflected
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
The impact of task complexity on people's mental models of MedlinePlus
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Dual-task performance in multimodal human-computer interaction: a psychophysiological perspective
Multimedia Tools and Applications
Exploring and predicting search task difficulty
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Examining users' knowledge change in the task completion process
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Why Do Users Perceive Search Tasks As Difficult? Exploring Difficulty in Different Task Types
Proceedings of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
The use of query suggestions during information search
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
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This paper reports our investigation of differences in users' behavior between difficult and easy search tasks, as well as how these differences vary with different types of tasks. We also report how behavioral predictors of task difficulty vary across task types. In addition, we explored how whole-task-session level user behaviors and within-task-session level behaviors differ in task difficulty prediction. Data were collected in a controlled lab experiment with 48 participants, each completing 6 search tasks of three types: single-fact finding, multiple-fact finding and multiple-piece information gathering. Results show that task type affects the relationships between task difficulty and user behaviors and that prediction of task difficulty should take account of task type. Results also show that both whole-session level and within-session level user behaviors can serve as task difficulty predictors. Whole-session level variables show higher prediction accuracy, but within-session level factors have the advantage of enabling real-time prediction. These findings can help search systems predict task difficulty and adapt to users.