Search Trails as Collaboration Artifacts – Evaluating the UX

Abstract

Users tend to share search results such as links or excerpts from web pages when performing complex search tasks. We developed a system called SearchTrails that enables sharing of complete search logs in the form of directed graphs, resembling the users’ trails through the Internet. We conducted a study with 29 participants in which we used both written reports and search trails as collaboration artifacts. We researched the value of search trails as artifacts for collaborative search compared to written reports. We did this by evaluating the user experience (UX) with both artifacts. By evaluating a user experience questionnaire (UEQ), we can confirm that search trails can support collaborative search better than written reports containing the essential information of the search trails.