Why Do Users Feel Search Task Difficult?

摘要

This paper reports on an examination of why informationsearchers find search tasks difficult and the specific reasonsthey feel difficult. Data was collected through a controlledlaboratory experiment with 32 participants, each workingwith 4 search tasks. They were asked in questionnaires,both before and after the tasks, for task difficulty ratingsand their reasoning for giving those ratings. We developeda coding scheme based on the difficulty reasons users gave,which covered various aspects of task, user, and user-taskinteraction. This helps us understand search task difficulty,as well as provides a scheme for task difficulty control inexperiment task design.