• prior frequency—how often participants did a task in their daily life, and
• prior familiarity—how familiar participants were with the requested information's location
• there was no difference between the two sessions in terms of the number of tasks that included some use of a search engine, and
• participants carried out most tasks on both days without using search engines.
Quadrant I. The user is looking for information for the first time. The user may make use of information-foraging strategies 14 and rely on prior related experiences. For example, a user who knows how to search for airline reservations might be able to find hotel prices fairly easily without ever having reserved a hotel online. Even for new tasks, familiarity with related domains might move the user from quadrant I to within one of the other quadrants.
Quadrant II. The user has some familiarity with the tasks but does not perform them frequently. These tasks might be well understood or important but performed only periodically. Examples include logging in to a bank account once or twice a month, occasionally looking up a phone number, or registering for courses on a university Web site at the start of each semester. Users might develop access patterns for these tasks but do not invest the time to create or learn significant shortcuts.
Quadrant III. The user repetitively performs the tasks. For example, some users check the weather frequently—perhaps multiple times in one day. In this quadrant, users are highly familiar with the task and strongly aware of the information's value. Thus, they adopt information-seeking behaviors that rely less on search engines and instead invest time or mental resources to create a streamlined or well-known access method. For example, they might commit a URL to memory, bookmark the page, routinely follow a specific sequence of links from a known starting point, or use their Web browser's autocompletion feature to access the information.
Quadrant IV. The user performs confusing or difficult tasks fairly often but is not yet proficient at them. Tasks in this quadrant are inherently difficult. One example is reaccessing a Web site with a long or complicated URL by manually typing in the address rather than bookmarking the site (which would move the task into quadrant III). Another example would be summarizing the previous day's headlines from various news sites—an inherently challenging task given the Web's dynamic nature. Quadrant IV probably contains fewer tasks than the other quadrants.
User movement. Many factors can cause a user to move around the quadrants for any given task. The arrow in Figure 2 indicates one possible progression: The user goes from doing a task for the first time to developing an access pattern once it becomes more familiar to establishing shortcuts when it becomes important enough to access frequently.
Movement from quadrant III to II or from quadrant II to I is also possible. Users who do not perform a task for a length of time may forget shortcuts and access patterns. In addition, exposure to many similar stimuli can make recall tasks more difficult. 15 For example, remembering which of multiple similar search queries originally led to the desired information can be difficult. 2