Scrolling and pagination for within document searching

Abstract

Increasingly, users are performing more sophisticated types of tasks, like web browsing and particularly information search, across computing platforms including desktops/laptops, tablets, and smartphones. While much research has been done to improve efficiency for each of these devices in the area of information search, no investigations have taken a pragmatic approach to determining the real efficiency costs across current state of the art devices and typical browser-based searching paradigms. We examine comparative task execution times for within document searching tasks under three different conditions: varying screen sizes (desktop, tablet, smartphone), varying interaction devices (mouse & keyboard and touchscreen) and varying interaction techniques (scrolling and pagination). In addition, we examine components of the task: scanning, skimming and raiding and combine reading rates and KLM measures to try to predict task execution time.