Reactive information foraging for evolving goals Authors: Joseph Lawrance, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy, Christopher Bogart, Calvin Swart Keywords: field study, information foraging theory, programming
Abstract:
Information foraging models have predicted the navigation paths of people browsing the web and (more recently) of programmers while debugging, but these models do not explicitly model users’ goals evolving over time. We present a new information foraging model called PFIS2 that does model information seeking with potentially evolving goals. We then evaluated variants of this model in a field study that analyzed programmers’ daily navigations over a seven-month period. Our results were that PFIS2 predicted users’ navigation remarkably well, even though the goals of navigation, and even the information landscape itself, were changing markedly during the pursuit of information.
In case you are wondering, “PFIS2 (Programmer Flow by Information Scent 2).”
A study of user information seeking behavior over seven (7) months following two (2) professional programmers.
Provocative work but it would be more convincing if the study sample were larger.