Effect of explicit roles on collaborative search in travel planning task

Abstract

This paper presents a task-based user study carried out to investigate how explicit roles assigned to group members affected collaborative information seeking behaviour during a travel planning task. 24 pairs participated our study where half of them were given a specific instruction to divide the roles into a searcher and writer, while others were given no such instruction. The evaluation looked at travel plans generated, search interaction logs, task perceptions, and dialogues between members. The results suggest that explicit division of roles can have significant effect son a group's knowledge building during the collaborative search task. The paper also discusses experimental designs of task-based collaborative search studies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.