It's Still Rock and Roll to Me: A Model of Online Browsing Behaviour

Abstract

Browsing has long been acknowledged as a critical information seeking strategy. Previous research on information browsing—browsing for books, videos or other items for which decisions have to be made based on an information surrogate—has focused on browsing in a physical context, and much of it predates technology found online today. We lack empirical data from the contemporary digital context to describe how people browse online. This study adopted scenario‐based interviews and observations to investigate people's online information browsing behaviour. Based on a qualitative analysis of the data, we proposed an online browsing journey model formed by four iterative activities: Choose the Browsing Collection, Select Candidates from the Browsing Collection, Inspect the Selected Candidates, Generate and Edit the Candidate list. This model offers novel insight into how people browse in the existing online context, which also forms the basis for further online browsing research.