Development and Evaluation of Search Tasks for IIR Experiments using a Cognitive Complexity Framework

Abstract

One of the most challenging aspects of designing interactive information retrieval (IIR) experiments with users is the development of search tasks. We describe an evaluation of 20 search tasks that were designed for use in IIR experiments and developed using a cognitive complexity framework from educational theory. The search tasks represent five levels of cognitive complexity and four topical domains. The tasks were evaluated in the context of a laboratory IIR experiment with 48 participants. Behavioral and self-report data were used to characterize and understand differences among tasks. Results showed more cognitively complex tasks required significantly more search activity from participants (e.g., more queries, clicks, and time to complete). However, participants did not evaluate more cognitively complex tasks as more difficult and were equally satisfied with their performances across tasks. Our work makes four contributions: (1) it adds to what is known about the relationship among task, search behaviors and user experience; (2) it presents a framework for task creation and evaluation; (3) it provides tasks and questionnaires that can be reused by others and (4) it raises questions about findings and assumptions of many recent studies that only use behavioral signals from search logs as evidence for task difficulty and searcher satisfaction, as many of our results directly contradict these findings.