Usage Patterns and Feedback Awareness The history of their own and their partners’ queries was considered a highly useful feature, with eight participants citing query awareness as one of their three favorite aspects of the system. Users frequently clicked on their own and others’ query histories in order to re-examine results lists. In total, search results lists were viewed due to an actual search on 189 occasions, and were viewed due to clicking on a prior query on 88 occasions; thus, 31.8% of all search result lists viewed during the study were the consequence of using the interactive query histories. These histories also served their intended purpose of increasing awareness of a partner’s activities; for instance, one user commented that this information “saved me some typing” when he noticed that his partner had already entered a query on a topic he had been about to explore. The association of metadata (visitation history, ratings, and comments) with webpages was also popular, receiving sev
en mentions in the “three favorite things about SearchTogether” lists. Although the ratings were a popular feature, there was unbalanced use of the positive and negative ratings, with the positive (“thumbs up”), being much more heavily used. A total of 70 thumbs up ratings were given during the study (36 via the “recommend” button and 34 via the “thumbs up” button), while only 9 negative ratings were given. One possible cause for this imbalance is that people found the positive ratings more useful since they not only expressed an opinion, but also impacted inclusion in the summary. We suspect that this bias might shift as people become more familiar with collaborative search tools, and learn to help their partners save time by bypassing pages that appear promising but turn out to have little informational payoff per their shared goals. The comments on pages fell into two main categories: comments summarizing the content of a page (“could be a good site for various day trips”) and comments reiterating specific information found within a page (“it appears to take three hours to drive between Disneyworld and Fort Myers”). This latter class of comments suggests that allowing users to highlight specific portions of pages, and making this highlighting visible to other group members on the page itself and in the summary view, might be a valuable capability to add to SearchTogether. Several users felt that SearchTogether would have been even more valuable had it provided an additional form of awareness information – the ability to see what page another group member was currently viewing. Five users cited the lack of ability to know what their partner is currently looking at as one of their least favorite things about the system. Providing an option to temporarily yoke a user’s browser to that of another group member’s would be one way to facilitate this type of awareness.