Capturing Information Behaviour in the Wild: A Tutorial

Understanding complex information behaviour in an empirical, ecologically valid way is difficult at the best of times. It verges on impossible with artificial environments and tightly constrained tasks such as those found in usability labs. Similarly artificial measures of user satisfaction that are readily available from test collections are unlikely to provoke revolutionary insights. The alternative is to study user behaviour in the wild, however this involves complex trade-offs between method, precision, privacy, interpretation and generalizability. This tutorial addresses both qualitative and quantitative methods, and how to balance the risks of studying unpredictable but fully human behaviour, particularly during and following a pandemic.