The effect of task type on preferred element types in an XML-based retrieval system

This article examines the influence of task type on the users’ preferred level of document elements (full articles, sections or subsections) during interaction with an XML-version of Wikipedia. We found that in general articles and subsections seemed to be the most valuable elements for our test subjects. For information gathering tasks this tendency was stronger whereas for factfinding tasks the sections seemed to play a more important role. We assume from this that users selected different information search strategies for the two task types. When dealing with factfinding tasks users seem in a higher degree to use one single element as an answer while they when they do information gathering they pick information from several elements.