Citation
Pirolli, P. L. An elementary social information foraging model. 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009); 2009 April 4-9; Boston, MA.
Abstract
User interfaces and information systems have become increasingly social in recent years, aimed at supporting the decentralized, cooperative production and use of content. A theory that predicts the impact of interface and interaction designs on such factors as participation rates and knowledge discovery is likely to be useful.
This paper reviews a variety of observed phenomena in social information foraging and sketches a framework extending Information Foraging Theory for making predictions about the effects of diversity, interference, and cost-of-effort on performance time, participation rates, and utility of discoveries.
