An investigation of the effects of awareness and task orientation on collaborative search

Abstract

Collaborative search is concerned with how people work together to address a common information need. In this paper, we investigate two factors that may influence collaborative search behaviors: providing awareness information about collaborators’ prior activities, and the orientation of the shared task. For awareness, we examined two levels: an aware condition in which participants could see their collaborators’ prior activity in the system, and a non-aware condition in which they could only see their own history. For orientation, we investigated a task with an open set of goals compared to a recall-oriented task that asked participants to find as many relevant documents as possible. Forty-one participants in a laboratory study used a prototype system called ResultsSpace to complete an asynchronous collaborative search task with three simulated collaborators. We developed a novel set of measures for examining collaborative behavior, and found that participants who were aware of their collaborators’ prior actions issued more query terms in common with their collaborators and tended to avoid rating or viewing documents that collaborators had already rated as compared to the non-aware group. We also observed an interaction between awareness and task-orientation in terms of the number of unique documents found, suggesting that task orientation could change the direction of the effect of awareness on document space exploration.