Scroll up or down?: Using Wheel Activity as an Indicator of Browsing Strategy across Different Contextual Factors.

This study used wheel activity as an indicator of users' browsing strategy, and explored the effects of various contextual factors on users' browsing patterns. Users' wheel activities were extracted from a search log in a user experiment, in which forty participants with different backgrounds conducted an online search in various contexts. To statistically test the potential effects of contexts on browsing strategy, we calculated three types of scroll-based variables to capture different types of browsing behaviors, and analyzed the effects of contextual factors via OLS regression analysis. Our results revealed that information understanding type tasks might lead to more proportion of revisit browsing range, while higher pressure level and higher pre-familiarity might lead to larger one-time browsing range; however, time constraint did not influence their browsing strategies. Our study also provided methodological implication for future interactive information retrieval studies by testifying and highlighting the usefulness of users' wheel activities in depicting online browsing patterns.