Bridging in-task emotional responses with post-task evaluations in digital library search interface user studies

Interactive information retrieval (IIR) interfaces are commonly evaluated using questionnaires that collect post-task subjective measures such as satisfaction, ease of use, usefulness, and user engagement. Although the importance of measuring emotional responses during the search process has been recognized, incorporating this aspect into IIR user studies has been challenging. We have developed a novel method to capture real-time emotional responses based on advances in facial emotion classification approaches. We utilize consumer-grade front-facing cameras to collect emotional responses, which synchronize with the user’s interactions with the search interface. In a controlled laboratory study, the relevance of search results was manipulated to validate the approach’s effectiveness and explore how search results’ relevance impacts users’ emotional responses, post-task evaluations of the search interface, and interactions with search interface features. This enabled us to examine whether we could detect emotional responses, whether recency effects were observed in post-task evaluations, and whether feature use correlated with emotional responses. The study was conducted in the context of exploratory search within an academic digital library. The results of this study demonstrate that both positive and negative emotional responses can be reliably detected during the search process. There is evidence of recency effects in post-task measures, and the study identifies specific interactive features used during the experience of positive and negative emotional responses. This serves as a foundation for the use of emotional responses to supplement post-task survey data when evaluating search interfaces.