Designing autotelic searching experience for casual-leisure by using the user's context

Abstract

Which is more important: the journey or the destination? Classical Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) based on work-task scenarios usually puts the emphasis on the destination of the search (the results) with metrics such as precision and recall rather than the search journey. But social media, mobile devices and other pervasive technologies have made information accessible to people in leisure scenarios and open up casual-leisure search behaviours motivated by hedonistic need such as having fun, or relaxing instead of a well-defined information need. During search sessions users might find irrelevant information but they may keep exploring because the IR system satisfies their current leisure need. This research aims to understand better casual-leisure search behaviour and design new IR systems to support autotelic search experiences. MOTIVATION"Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness" Chuang Tzu (Taoism, 389-286 BC) Everyday we find people, places and things that have changed our lives without looking for them [5]. Often the experience related to the finding is as important as the content itself [16]. What if in order to discover "unexpected useful" [11] information we need to stop looking and following the query-response paradigm? For long time digital IIR has been approached as a findability problem and related to a magic search box. Classical IIR models have focused their attention on the destination (the results or the goal) of the search with metrics such as precision and recall instead of the search experience itself [17] (e.g engagement, flow, telepresence, etc).Ubiquitous social media services have shown that classical information behaviour models based on work-task scenarios fall short of common information leisure search behaviours.For example, an individual might search social media for hours because he is bored rather than because he wants to fill a gap in his knowledge. Elsweiler et al. [4] have highlighted the need to reconsider information behaviour theory for casual-leisure search and the design of IR-systems for leisure scenarios.Query-response based information retrieval systems have been apparently successful in work-based scenarios, although many have highlighted the importance of moving beyond this paradigm when the work-task is exploratory or involves learning [12,22]. Search engines are limited not just because of their ranking algorithms or technology stack, but by the interaction paradigm and the assumptions they have made about the searcher [19,20].This research aims to explore casual-leisure behaviour in social media by eliciting curiosity driven search sessions and how to design autotelic 1 search experiences (e.g. users find irrelevant information but are happy with their search experience, and then when they are fully absorbed they explore in depth and may discover unexpectedly useful information). RESEARCH QUESTIONS• Is it possible to design autotelic search experiences in order to study casual leisure search in action?• Does curiosity-driven search experience ...