Help-Seeking Situation: Difficulty assessing relevance of search results, subjects, or collections

Relative Importance:

 

Definition: This is a cognitive situation related to a user questioning why search results, subjects, or collections are included. Slightly distinct from difficulty identifying a relevant result or collection, this situation relates to the users’ confusion about something that appears which seems to have little related to the search or selection.  

 

Factor(s):

 

  • Lack of domain knowledge
  • Lack of system knowledge
  • Lack of Contextual information
  • Insufficient content coverage
  • Unclear labeling
  • No sort/filter
  • Irrelevant or confusing results

 

  • Repeated results

Guideline or Design Recommendation

  1. Display results by relevance by default with a relevance score.
  2. Provide subjects, collections, or items specifically related to the search query.   

 

Rationale and Objective:  In DLs, it is often difficult for BVI users to determine why some items or subjects are grouped with other search results, subjects, and collections, when intuitively there does not appear to be a connection among these. Only displaying the relevance scores calculated by search engines might not be sufficient because the numerical values may not explain the direct reasons for this inclusion of items or resources. Clusters or groups including related terms and collections can be more intuitively understandable.

 

Techniques, Methods, and Features

Techniques and Methods

  • Display relevance scores or ratings that might be measured by search engines.
  • Provide groups (e.g. subjects group or collections) related to the search query with numerical scores representing the degree of how deeply there are connected (e.g. modularity score – Blondel, Guillaume, Lambiotte, & Lefebvre, 2008, cluster analysis).
  • Sort the results by relevance by default

 

Features

  • Relevance score
  • Modularity score
  • Subjects or collections cluster
  • Sorting by relevance  

Examples:

 

Related Resources:

Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment, 2008(10), P10008.

SPSS. Cluster analysis. http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/arm/SPSS/spss8.pdf

SPSS. The SPSS TwoStep Cluster Component. https://www.spss.ch/upload/1122644952_The%20SPSS%20TwoStep%20Cluster%20Component.pdf

WCAG 2.0 Guideline 2.4 Navigable https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#navigation-mechanisms

WCAG 2.0 Guideline 3.1 Readable https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#meaning

WCAG 2.0 Guideline 3.2 Predictable https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#consistent-behavior

See also:

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > User factors > Lack of Domain knowledge

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > User factors > Lack of System knowledge

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > Lack of contextual information

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > Insufficient Content Coverage

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > Unclear labeling

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > No sort/filter

 

Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > Irrelevant or confusing results
Help-seeking Situations >  Difficulty Evaluating Information > Factors > System design > Repeated results