Situation normality and the shape of search: The effects of time delays and information presentation on search behavior

Abstract

Delays have become one of the most often cited complaints of Web users. Long delays often cause users to abandon their searches, but how do tolerable delays affect information search behavior? Intuitively, we would expect that tolerable delays should induce decreased information search. We conducted two experiments and found that as delay increased, a point occurs at which time within-page information search increases ; that is, search behavior remained the same until a tipping point occurs where delay increases the depth of search. We argue that situation normality explains this phenomenon; users have become accustomed to tolerable delays up to a point (our research suggests between 7 and 11 seconds) after which search behavior changes. That is, some delay is expected, but as delay becomes noticeable but not long enough to cause the abandonment of search, an increase occurs in the "stickiness" of Web pages such that users examine more information on each page before moving to new pages. The net impact of tolerable delays was counter intuitive: tolerable delays had no impact on the total amount of data searched in the first experiment, but induced users to examine more data points in the second experiment.

Stuck in traffic

“…Their results provided support for the hypothesis related to page delay time, and the volume of information examined on each page -resulting in stickier webpages. A similar finding was also found by Taylor et al [33]. While these findings are interesting, it should be noted that subjects in the aforementioned studies did not issue their own queries.…”

“…Studies have shown that people perform better at a given task when an obstacle is in their way [23], and constraints may allow people to clarify and focus on the task at hand [19]. This can already be observed to a certain degree in the cost-interaction hypothesis [2], for examplewith increased querying costs leading to stickier results [33].…”

“…It has been shown that the longer a page takes to load, the less favourably users see that page when it finally appears [28]. However, Taylor et al [33] showed that longer load times resulted in searchers examining more of the downloaded page. Conversely, when query response times increased, it was shown that searchers submitted fewer queries [6,30].…”

“…These delays are often cited as a complaint by the users of websites [33]. For example, Galletta et al [15] examined how the behaviour of users changed when faced with page load delays of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 seconds.…”

“…The next section summarises the key works that examine di↵erent kinds of delay and their e↵ects on user behaviour. In the context of search, these works have focused exclusively on either document download delays when interacting with a list of results [11,33], or query response delays [6,30]. This paper examines both kinds of delay, and how they influence and a↵ect search behaviour in the context of a complete search task.…”