Research About User Behavior Based On Information Scent

With the development of information technology and the progress of human society, human have entered an information age. How to obtain the desired information in the flood of information more quickly and effectively, has become a huge problem. Since the process of human foraging information is similar to the animals foraging, some scholars have proposed the concept of information foraging to solve the question that how to make user a series obtain information efficiency in the Internet environment.There is an important concept in the information foraging theory, called information scent. Users are guided and driven by information foraging information scent while foraging information. The research in this paper is based on the theory of information foraging and information scent. This paper is about the characteristics of information scent and the impact on the user, aiming to find out some laws and principles and to provide users with high-quality and more efficient information. The conclusions are valuable for designers of website and software.The work of this paper consists of two parts:theoretical research and experimental exploration.In the theoretical research, this paper has clearly defined the concept of information scent, analyzed and summarized some common types of information scent. Information scent has several characteristics:specificity, relevance, diversity, polymerism, decrease. The foraging behavior of users on the Internet is divided into two types:browsing behavior without any purpose and searching behavior with some purpose. In these two situations, the information scent plays different roles. This paper analysed the different between the two situation and how to measure the efficiency in searching situation.In the experimental exploratory, this paper directed two sets of comparative experiments by using an eye tracker to find out the difference of information scent in the two different situations. According to the experiments, browsing behavior is divided into the overall cognitive and refining reading stage, and searching behavior is divided into the overall cognitive, fast search, refining the search stage. In browsing situation, information scent mainly works in cognitive stage, and in searching situation, information scent works in all the stages. According to the experiments, duration of gaze in the two kinds of situations have no significant different, but people who in the searching situation has a faster saccadic speed.Finally, based on the above research results, this paper gives some suggestions to designers in order to enhance the user experience.