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"When using the Web is a big challenge"
06/04/2003 Entry
I thought I'd share some findings from my dissertation. Overall, I was looking at how people find content online. The basic idea is that the binary approach of the "digital divide" is too simplistic by assuming that once people have access to the Internet they can fully benefit from the medium. Rather, I argue that people differ in their ability to use the medium effectively and efficiently and this may have implications for social inequality.
The first step was to see whether people's skills do differ. I came up with a methodology to study this. I define skill as the ability to locate content online effectively and efficiently. I measure this by seeing whether people can find certain types of content and how long they take to do so. I conducted in-person observations with a random sample of 100 Internet users in my county to gather data.
I've run lots of quantitative analyses, but I thought I'd share a qualitative snippet of the data here instead. Below, I describe the actions of some low-skilled users. An interesting finding for me was to see how little some people know about Web use. I think it is very important to remember that many such people do exist out there. It is problematic to assume that everyone knows how to make use of the Web. Some people don't even know about search engines but many of those who do don't use them well either. It seems problematic to argue that these people are on the good side of the "digital divide" simply because they can be classified as having Internet access.
The following is quoted from my dissertation "How Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online".
Those who were unable to locate content on the Web not only lack specific knowledge about online features but are also much less likely to switch between strategies. As the description of these users’ actions will show, they tend to stick to one strategy for many searches even when the particular strategy has not been successful for previous tasks and shows no signs of improving their chances of efficient navigation.
Lynne is a 64-year-old divorced mother of five who lives alone and works part time as a crisis counselor. She is among one of the most novice participants in the study as she had only been using the Internet for two years when she took part in the project. She spends just a few minutes a day browsing the Web. She had a very hard time finding content online. She is an AOL user and she barely left the AOL interface and channels during her entire session. She clicked on an AOL channel for almost all of the tasks.
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Lynne showed quite a bit of frustration during the study, evident from comments such as “Oh Lord. At this point I would give up at home.” It seems like she is used to turning to others for help. At one point during the session she mentioned that in a former position she used to have a secretary who did many things for her, so she never developed certain skills. She depends on others for help; but since she lives alone such assistance is not always available, making it hard for her to pick up helpful hints about Web use. In response to whether she had ever shopped for anything online she explained:
Lynne: I tried…I did try that shower thing. [clicks on Shop@AOL]. [pause 40s browsing]. Actually, Babies R Us was on here. Babies…essentials. Ok, and my niece was registered so… Okay. [clicks on registry search and types in niece’s name and location].
Researcher: How did you find out about this?
Lynne: She told me. It was in the shower invitation. So that didn’t come up. It said Babies R Us. So then when I couldn’t locate her name then I thought I would look up some baby products and buy them online and then send it. I tried…[pause 71s browsing]. [sounds frustrated]. I remember I tried to go in there and buy a gift certificate but I was frustrated. […] You know, I don’t know. I got so far but then I didn’t get any further. See, I saw this, you can add it, you can shop and add it to your cart. My daughter and her friend, they do this all the time. I got frustrated. I tried to add a gift certificate. I was going to ask my daughter to come over and help me with it but then we never got to it. […] I got right to the point of trying to get a gift certificate and then they said to put your email, you know, all that, it’s strange.
Overall, Lynne did not spend much time on the tasks but this was mostly because she could not think of ways to find her way around on the Web. Without exception, all of her strategies involved clicking on an AOL Channel and then clicking on a link available on the Channel guide or performing a search on a search engine within an AOL Channel. Since some of the tasks did not map onto AOL’s Channel classification very well, she was unable to find much of the content requested in the study.
Trey is a 39-year-old father of a 19-year-old daughter. He lives with his mother and often visits with other members of his family, which became apparent when he referred to his nephews’ use of the Web several times during the session. In fact, one of his nephews accompanied him to the study, although he stayed outside while Trey was performing the online tasks. They had to take a bus to the university site because Trey does not have access to a car. He makes his living by assembling air conditioners.
Trey’s session looked very similar to Lynne’s. He also relied on AOL’s Channels for all of the tasks and was unable to find relevant information in the majority of cases. He got stuck on the task requesting him to find information about a local cultural event because the AOL Local Guide does not have a listing for New Jersey. The closest one can get to this zip code area is Philadelphia, which left him confused and lost as he tried to narrow in to events closer to his residence.
Like Lynne, Trey was lost without a potential support network. While looking for the contact information of a long lost friend, he made the following comment:
I’ve seen my nephew done this before. I haven’t done it before. I guess I would have to type in their name. The person I’m lookin’ for and their address and all that stuff. I mean, not their address […] Their name. I’m tryin’ to think, where would I go for that? … I’m lost. I’m very lost.
Sierra is a 44-year-old mother of three who lives with her children and husband. She works as a data administrator at a department store. She has only been a user for two years and spends just an hour browsing the Web monthly. Like both Lynne and Trey, she is a novice both in terms the of number of years she has been an Internet user and how much time she spends online during the week.
Sierra used Netscape Navigator during the session and relied on Netscape’s portal for all of her actions. (She relied on knowledge of a specific site and typing in its URL directly when she was sharing information about whether she has ever done any shopping online.) She had the search savvy to include multiple terms in her search queries, a strategy that sometimes led to promising results ultimately leading her to complete half of the tasks successfully.
Sierra’s biggest limitation was that she had little knowledge about reading the results of a search query. Some search engines offer a list of related search terms when a user runs a search. These are called “related searches” and when the user clicks on any of these links the search engines runs a new search on the particular query. Unfortunately, Sierra often clicked on these links as though they were results to her original query and would lead her to relevant Web sites. This left her going in circles quite often, which explains why she spent such a long time on the session as a whole. She also did not know enough about search results to identify sponsored, pay-for-placement links and clicked on such results during four of her searches. Clicking on such links never resulted in completing a task but did add one to three minutes to her time spent on the particular tasks.
Maggie is a 72-year-old widow and mother of three, who lives alone. She arrived at the study with an Internet guidebook in hand and very enthusiastic to try her skills. Overall, she spent more time in the study location than any other respondent, leaving more than three hours after she had arrived. (The average session took an hour and a half.) Although in theory she had learned much about Web searching, in reality she was unable to put these into practice in ways that would have helped her efficiency. She started almost every task with the MSN sidebar search engine. She knew to use the Boolean operator AND, and she head read about the utility of quotation marks.
She did not always use these in the most beneficial ways, however. In fact, the only time she used the quotation marks she put them around one word, an action which has no utility, and around “washington dc,” which is likely of little use as well, as those terms are likely to appear next to each other in many cases regardless of the forced proximity. Maggie also got confused when trying to access specific Web sites. Three times she typed the name of a Web site in the search engine with spaces (so far so good) but then added a domain name extension to the end of the term leading to no results in response to the search query (examples of this are may clinic.org, info seek.com, treasuary dept us.gov (sic)). She also made numerous spelling mistakes, which slowed her down even more. Despite these hurdles, she did manage to find 75 percent of content she was asked to locate, mostly due to the use of multiple terms in search queries and persistence in looking until she figured out why she was not getting relevant results to her queries.
Maggie made a comment during her search for used car information that sheds some light on why previous experience with a task does not seem to show much relationship to online ability as per the analyses presented in Chapter-Skills. After spending more than five minutes unsuccessfully looking for used car information for the New Jersey area she noted the following.
So we have to choose a different way. I would, you know, usually, I would first go to the library, yeah, like Edmunds, and so on, and look up the prices, and then generally I get led to a few other things, but then I come back.
This comment suggests that Maggie knows about Edmunds, a helpful guide for used car buying. However, she did not translate this offline knowledge to her online actions. Although edmunds.com is a helpful site for this task, she did not attempt to access it during her session. This example helps to explain why experience with a task may not be significantly related to successful online ability with the same task.
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Interested in more? Feel free to get in touch with me by writing to eszter-at-princeton-dot-edu .
Replies: 1 Comment has been posted, click here to see it and add your own
This is very interesting, Eszter. I think that your study is a sorely needed addition to the discussion of Internet use. I can't wait to read the book!
Posted by Tina Fetner @ 06/05/2003 02:44 PM CST
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