Details about the browsing task given to the participant, including the participant’s goals. The task can be focused (e.g. information searching), more casual browsing, or may be purely navigational. The task can be directed closely by the researcher or be opportunistic and motivated by the needs of the participant.
Published in Chapter:
Recommendations for Reporting Web Usage Studies
Kirstie Hawkey (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Melanie Kellar (Google, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 24
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-974-8.ch010
Abstract
This chapter presents recommendations for reporting context in studies of Web usage including Web browsing behavior. These recommendations consist of eight categories of contextual information crucial to the reporting of results: user characteristics, temporal information, Web browsing environment, nature of the Web browsing task, data collection methods, descriptive data reporting, statistical analysis, and results in the context of prior work. This chapter argues that the Web and its user population are constantly growing and evolving. This changing temporal context can make it difficult for researchers to evaluate previous work in the proper context, particularly when detailed information about the user population, experimental methodology, and results is not presented. The adoption of these recommendations will allow researchers in the area of Web browsing behavior to more easily replicate previous work, make comparisons between their current work and previous work, and build upon previous work to advance the field.