Factors affecting users’ measure of interest: a study of the effect of task, document difficulty and document familiarity

Data on the web is constantly growing which may affect users’ ability to find relevant information within a reasonable time limit. Some of the factors previously studied that affect users searching behaviour are task difficulty and topic familiarity. In this paper, we consider a set of implicit feedback parameters to investigate how document difficulty and document familiarity affects users searching behaviour in a task-specific context. An experiment was conducted and data was collected from 77 undergraduate students of Computer science. Users’ implicit features and explicit ratings of document difficulty and familiarity were captured and logged through a plugin in Firefox browser. Implicit feedback parameters were correlated with user ratings for document difficulty and familiarity. The result showed no correlation between implicit feedback parameters and the rating for document familiarity. There was, however, a negative correlation between user mouse activities and document difficulty ratings. Also, the dataset of all the participants in the experiment was grouped according to task type and analysed. The result showed that their behaviour varies according to task type. Our findings provide more insight into studying the moderating factors that affect user searching behaviour.