Revealing the Role of User Moods in Struggling Search Tasks

Abstract: User-centered approaches have been extensively studied and used in the area of struggling search. Related research has targeted key aspects of users such as user satisfaction or frustration, and search success or failure, using a variety of experimental methods including laboratory user studies, in-situ explicit feedback from searchers and by using crowdsourcing. Such studies are valuable in advancing the understanding of search difficulty from a user's perspective, and yield insights that can directly improve search systems and their evaluation. However, little is known about how user moods influence their interactions with a search system or their perception of struggling. In this work, we show that a user's own mood can systematically bias the user's perception, and experience while interacting with a search system and trying to satisfy an information need. People who are in activated-pleasant / activated-unpleasant moods tend to issue more queries than people in deactivated or neutral moods. Those in an unpleasant mood perceive a higher level of difficulty. Our insights extend the current understanding of struggling search tasks and have important implications on the design and evaluation of search systems supporting such tasks.