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

Zhang Huiwen, Buchanan George, Kelly Ryan, Twidale Michael, Chang Shanton, McKay Dana

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)381-392
Number of pages12
JournalProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume59
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Browsing
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Information Behaviours
  • Information Seeking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science
  • Library and Information Sciences

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'It's Still Rock and Roll to Me: A Model of Online Browsing Behaviour'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this