Toward a Better Understanding of Help Seeking Behavior: An Evaluation of Help Mechanisms in Two IR systems

Xie, Hong (Iris) and Cool, Colleen Toward a Better Understanding of Help Seeking Behavior: An Evaluation of Help Mechanisms in Two IR systems., 2006 . In 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper]

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English abstract

Help-seeking can be viewed as a multi-dimensional information behavior which often overlaps with both information seeking and searching. Within IR, though, there has been little research devoted to understanding how people learn to use help functionalities effectively. Research reported in this paper addresses this gap. After searching in two IR systems, fifty participants completed a self-administered questionnaire which described the ways they learned to use the help mechanisms; difficulties associated with this learning process; their general evaluation of the help mechanisms, with specification of features that they liked and disliked; specific aspects of the help mechanism that assisted participants in the search process; and their evaluation of the interaction between the searcher and the help mechanisms. The results show that people prefer specific help, visual help, and help with demos instead of general help, text help, and help with description. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are further discussed.

Item type: Conference paper
Keywords: help systems ; help menu ; information retrieval systems ; user behavior ; assessment
Subjects: B. Information use and sociology of information > BH. Information needs and information requirements analysis.
I. Information treatment for information services > IK. Design, development, implementation and maintenance
B. Information use and sociology of information > BI. User interfaces, usability.
Depositing user: Norm Medeiros
Date deposited: 22 Dec 2006
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:05
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/8698

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