Preliminary exploration of the effect of time constraint on search interactions on webpages

Abstract

This study explored the effect of time constraint on searchers' interactions during two kinds of tasks through conducting a user experiment. The results demonstrated users' did not tend to accelerate their reading or decision speed given time constraint, but to select fewer pages to read, i.e. visit fewer content pages and search result pages (SERPs); and they had more mouse clicks but fewer keystrokes per page when searching with time constraint. The results also showed the different effects of time constraint on search interactions on pages for two types of tasks. The results have implications for the design of digital library systems that take account users' time constraint or time pressure.