The Motive Web Design Glossary
information foraging
Information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyse how humans collect information online. This theoretical framework can be used to critique web design and improve user interaction.
Key dimensions to this analogy include:
- Information scent: Predicting a path’s success
- Does your page navigation signal to the user that they have reached, or are nearing their goal?
- Does the destination page meet the expectations set by the navigation?
- Diet selection: What to eat
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- Does your site provide ‘nutritious’ information?
- How easily can a user find and use this information?
- Patch selection: When to hunt elsewhere
- Does your site address a user’s immediate needs?
The term information foraging was coined by the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues as the result of human-computer interaction research.
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (useit.com)
call to action, information architecture, navigation
References and further reading
- Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales (useit.com)
Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem. - Information Foraging (CiteSeer)
Published research by Peter Pirolli, Stuart K. Card. Choose the "Cached: PDF" link (top right) to download the complete paper. - Information Hunters (InfoVis)
The behaviour of human beings when searching for information intensively resembles that of the hunter-gatherers of our past and that of the foraging of animals. Information Visualisation tries to take advantage of this finding.
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