SIGIR '02 Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Biasing web search results for topic familiarity
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Task difficulty as a predictor and indicator of web searching interaction
CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
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
Predicting task difficulty for different task types
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
Predicting query performance via classification
ECIR'2010 Proceedings of the 32nd European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium
Assigning search tasks designed to elicit exploratory search behaviors
Proceedings of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
Exploring and predicting search task difficulty
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
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In this paper, we examined why information searchers perceive search tasks as difficult, and what factors/reasons make them perceive tasks as difficult. We also examined if task difficulty reasons vary across different tasks (task types). Data was collected through a controlled laboratory experiment in which tasks were designed following a classification scheme. A total of 32 undergraduate students participated, each was given 4 search tasks, and they were asked in questionnaires both before and after the tasks for task difficulty ratings and why they gave those ratings. We developed a coding scheme based on the difficulty reasons users gave, which covered various aspects of task, user, and user-task interaction. Difficulty reasons were categorized following this scheme. Results showed that searchers had some common reasons for task difficulty in different tasks, but most of the difficulty reasons varied across tasks. For each task, there were also common reasons for task difficulty, although there was some variation here as well. Task difficulty was also found to be negatively correlated with users topic knowledge, previous experience, and topic interest. Our findings help understand search task difficulty, as well as the relationships between task difficulty and task type, knowledge background, etc. These can also be helpful with experiment task design.