Design of experimental task
The experiment relied on the system to automatically convey the mission, collect the data,check if the participants had completed the task, and record the operational performance of users. After they were separated into groups, each participant received three tasks, and subsequent tasks only appeared when the previous one had been completed. Borlund and Dreier (2014) mentioned Ingwersen’s definition of three information needs – verificative information need, (VIN, well-defined and stable), conscious topical information need (CIN,well-defined and more variable in nature), and muddled topical information need (MIN,poorly defined and presenting high cognitive uncertainty). The differences between the three needs lie in whether the information seeker has a thorough understanding of the search topic, the searching situation, and the structural stability of the search question. As a result, the VIN task in this experiment was to ask participants to look for daily assignments, then the CIN task was to look for comic books that were non-curriculum but
widely loved by children, and the MIN task was to look for professional sports knowledge that might be unfamiliar. The tasks were designed to prove that interface spatiality is helpful for seeking information; therefore, the users were only told to find the database itself, instead of actually searching in the database: