Let’s search together, but not too close! An analysis of communication and performance in collaborative information seeking

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Abstract

Communication is considered to be one of the most essential components of collaboration, but our understanding as to which form of communication provides the most optimal cost-benefit balance lacks severely. To help investigate effects of various communication channels on a collaborative project, we conducted a user study with 30 pairs (60 participants) in three different conditions – co-located, remotely located with text chat, and remotely located with text as well as audio chat, in an exploratory search task. Using both quantitative and qualitative data analysis, we found that teams with remotely located participants were more effective in terms of being able to explore more diverse information. Adding audio support for remote collaboration helped participants to lower their cognitive load as well as negative emotions compared to those working in the same space. We also show how these findings could help design more effective systems for collaborative information seeking tasks using adequate and appropriate communication. We argue that collaboration is an important aspect of human-centered IR, and that our work provides interesting insights into people doing information seeking/retrieval in collaboration.

Highlights

► We study three communication contexts in collaborative information seeking (CIS). ► Remotely located participants are more effective finding diverse information. ► Those who use text-based communication are more task oriented. ► Audio support in remote CIS provides balance between task and social communication. ► Audio support in remote CIS helps users to lower their cognitive and affective load.

Introduction

Most of the studies in information seeking/retrieval have focused primarily on people as individual entities (Reddy and Jansen, 2008, Shah, 2010b). Many scholars have recognized, however, that information seeking is often a social process involving groups of people (Morris, 2008, Reddy, 2002, Sonnenwald, 1996, Twidale et al., 1997) who engage in several activities to reach goals that are difficult to achieve individually. In today’s organizations and groups, the speed and complexity of information and communication flows often exceed the processing capacities of individuals (Yuan, Fulk, & Monge, 2007), which require individuals to work together to collect, analyze, and synthesize information.

Some studies have already examined social practices that affect collaboration during the information seeking process. For instance, an extensive literature review on collaborative information seeking (CIS) has identified information sharing, coordination, and awareness as core processes of collaborative work (Shah, 2010b). In addition, other studies have revealed awareness, division of labor, persistence (Morris & Horvitz, 2007), and brainstorming (Morris, 2008) as supporting components of collaborative Web search. However, these studies have not considered potential costs and benefits of communication processes in CIS. In contrast, the first goal of this work is to explore the communication processes of teams in CIS.

A common finding in communication research is that physical proximity facilitates communication by increasing spontaneous interactions. Although the literature has shown that communication can facilitate greater exchange of high-quality information, research has also demonstrated negative effects of social interaction on problem solving, generation of ideas, and affective as well as cognitive load. For instance, Kratzer, Leenders, and Van Engelen (2006) have found that interaction frequency negatively influences team creativity. Along with these lines, the second goal of this work is to compare the CIS process and products of teams across three different communication contexts (co-located, text chat, audio + text chat) within the theoretical framework of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Specifically, we investigate how communication contexts constrain or improve communication processes and the outcomes in CIS.

Social and collaborative aspects of information retrieval/seeking are essential for designing better information retrieval (IR) and human–computer interaction (HCI) systems. Early studies showed that communication is necessary for system designers of collaborative solutions to understand the costs and benefits related to communication choices under various circumstances (Grudin, 1994). Besides communication needs, introducing support for collaborative search as well as sense-making could help to improve exploratory search experience (Morris, 2007). Given that proximity has different effects on communication processes and outcomes, the final goal of this work is to identify social features needed in different communication contexts that could help to design better systems.

To meet our goals, we conducted an experiment with 60 participants in 30 pairs. Each pair was randomly assigned to three different experimental conditions (collocated, text chat, and text plus audio chat) defined based on spatial context and communication support. The following section provides background for this work, along with specific gaps in our understanding of this subject and their corresponding research questions. Next, we present our study design, results, and analyses. Finally, the paper concludes with reflections on the results, as well as implications for CIS system design.

Section snippets

Background and research questions

Several studies have investigated the effect of communication context on the performance of collaborative teams. Within the framework of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), studies have examined the effect of CMC (Fidas, Komis, Tzanavaris, & Avouris, 2005). Other studies have compared face-to-face (F2F) and chat communication (Newlands, Anderson, & Mullin, 2003), and F2F, co-located, and video-mediated communication (VMC) (Doherty-Sneddon et al., 1997). However, none of these studies

Participants

We conducted a laboratory study involving a total of 60 participants in 30 collaborative pairs. We chose the minimum group size in this study to avoid the incorporation of new and potential intervening variables. Early studies showed that as the number of collaborators working together increases, the complexity of possible interactions increases exponentially, thus increasing the likelihood of misinterpretation and misunderstanding (Tang et al., 2010). Minimizing group size allowed us to have

Data analysis

In order to study the communication within teams, we devised a specific method that consisted of four stages: (1) pre-processing, (2) coding, (3) post-processing, and (4) evaluation.

Evaluation

In order to perform comparisons across conditions, we devised an evaluation method, which consisted of four sets of measures: communication, productivity, information synthesis, and cognitive/affective load measures.

Communication

Our first research question addressed the communication dynamics of teams in different communication contexts in a CIS task. We used an existing coding scheme based on a CSCL task to identify the communication dynamics of teams in a CIS task (Table 2). During the coding process, our analysis revealed three subcategories of communication messages, namely: strategy (S), information seeking (IS), and awareness (A). These specific kinds of messages resulted from the nature of task and context (

Discussion and implications

The findings present the cost-benefit picture of each communication context in interaction and performance of teams. For example, we found that F2F setup allows team members to interact effortlessly, generating a larger volume of communication compared to those that collaborate remotely. While such effortless communication involves discussion about the task, more chatting on non-task related topics presents challenges for team performance. In fact, F2F participants were less diversified in

Conclusion

Through a controlled laboratory study, we assessed the pros and cons of three different setups of people working in synchronous collaborative information seeking (CIS) task. The contributions of the work reported here based on this study are several. First, we provided a methodology that is not often seen in studying collaboration; it included a well-informed study design, a unique combination of interesting and challenging task, and a system for providing CIS-related tools and logging user

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