Analyzing user behavior in search process models

Abstract

Search processes constitute one type of Customer Journey Processes (CJP) as they reflect search (interaction) of customers with an information system or web platform. Understanding the search behavior of customers can yield invaluable insights for, e.g., providing a better search service offer. This work takes a first step towards the analysis of search behavior along paths in the search process models. The paths are identified based on an existing structural process model metric. A novel data-oriented metric based on the number of retrieved search results per search activity is proposed. This metric enables the identification of search patterns along the paths. The metric-based search behavior analysis is prototypically implemented and evaluated based on a real-world data set from the tourism domain.