ABSTRACT
An important part of finding information online involves clicking from page to page until an information need is fully satisfied. This is a complex task that can easily be frustrating and force users to give up prematurely. An empirical analysis of what makes users abandon click-based navigation tasks is hard, since most passively collected browsing logs do not specify the exact target page that a user was trying to reach. We propose to overcome this problem by using data collected via Wikispeedia, a Wikipedia-based human-computation game, in which users are asked to navigate from a start page to an explicitly given target page (both Wikipedia articles) by only tracing hyperlinks between Wikipedia articles. Our contributions are two-fold. First, by analyzing the differences between successful and abandoned navigation paths, we aim to understand what types of behavior are indicative of users giving up their navigation task. We also investigate how users make use of back clicks during their navigation. We find that users prefer backtracking to high-degree nodes that serve as landmarks and hubs for exploring the network of pages. Second, based on our analysis, we build statistical models for predicting whether a user will finish or abandon a navigation task, and if the next action will be a back click. Being able to predict these events is important as it can potentially help us design more human-friendly browsing interfaces and retain users who would otherwise have given up navigating a website.
- M. Ageev, Q. Guo, D. Lagun, and E. Agichtein. Find it if you can: A game for modeling different types of Web search success using interaction data. In SIGIR'11, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Brin and L. Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1), 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. H. Chi, P. Pirolli, K. Chen, and J. Pitkow. Using information scent to model user information needs and actions and the Web. In CHI'01, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Das Sarma, S. Gollapudi, and S. Ieong. Bypass rates: Reducing query abandonment using negative inferences. In KDD'08, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Diriye, R. W. White, G. Buscher, and S. Dumais. Leaving so soon? Understanding and predicting Web search abandonment rationales. In CIKM'12, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Downey, S. Dumais, D. Liebling, and E. Horvitz. Understanding the relationship between searchers' queries and information goals. In CIKM'08, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Harrigan, D. Archambault, P. Cunningham, and N. Hurley. EgoNav: Exploring networks through egocentric spatializations. In AVI'12, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Kleinberg. The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic perspective. In STOC'00, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Li, S. Huffman, and A. Tokuda. Good abandonment in mobile and PC Internet search. In SIGIR'09, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Milgram. The small world problem. Psychology Today, 2, 1967.Google Scholar
- C. Olston and E. H. Chi. ScentTrails: Integrating browsing and searching on the Web. TCHI, 10(3), September 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Teevan, C. Alvarado, M. S. Ackerman, and D. R. Karger. The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search. In CHI'04, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Trattner, D. Helic, P. Singer, and M. Strohmaier. Exploring the differences and similarities between hierarchical decentralized search and human navigation in information networks. In i-KNOW'12, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. von Landesberger, M. Gorner, and T. Schreck. Visual analysis of graphs with multiple connected components. In VAST'09, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. West and J. Leskovec. Automatic versus human navigation in information networks. In ICWSM'12, 2012.Google Scholar
- R. West and J. Leskovec. Human wayfinding in information networks. In WWW'12, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. West, J. Pineau, and D. Precup. Wikispeedia: An online game for inferring semantic distances between concepts. In IJCAI'09, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. W. White and J. Huang. Assessing the scenic route: Measuring the value of search trails in Web logs. In SIGIR'10, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. W. White and D. Morris. Investigating the querying and browsing behavior of advanced search engine users. In SIGIR'07, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. W. White and A. Singla. Finding our way on the Web: Exploring the role of waypoints in search interaction. In WWW'11, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- The last click: why users give up information network navigation
Recommendations
Modeling Navigation in Information Networks
WSDM '17: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data MiningNavigation in an information space is a natural way to explore and discover its content. Information systems on the Web like digital encyclopedias (e.g., Wikipedia) are interested in providing good navigational support to their users. To that end, ...
Human wayfinding in information networks
WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide WebNavigating information spaces is an essential part of our everyday lives, and in order to design efficient and user-friendly information systems, it is important to understand how humans navigate and find the information they are looking for. We perform ...
Random surfers on a web encyclopedia
i-KNOW '15: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven BusinessThe random surfer model is a frequently used model for simulating user navigation behavior on the Web. Various algorithms, such as PageRank, are based on the assumption that the model represents a good approximation of users browsing a website. However, ...
Comments