Tasks, Time, and Tools: Quantifying Online Sensemaking Efforts Through a Survey-based Study

TL;DR

This study provides empirical insights into online sensemaking efforts by analyzing user survey data, revealing how people spend time on tasks, their tool usage, and unmet support needs in real-world browsing sessions.

Contribution

It offers new empirical data on time allocation, task distribution, and tool use in everyday online research, expanding understanding beyond lab environments.

Findings

Users spend significant time on exploratory browsing sessions.

There is a lack of externalization and tool use despite desire for support.

Most sensemaking occurs without external tools or externalization.

Abstract

Aiming to help people conduct online research tasks, much research has gone into tools for searching for, collecting, organizing, and synthesizing online information. However, outside of the lab, in-the-wild sensemaking sessions (with data on tasks, users, their tools and challenges) can ground us in the reality of such efforts and the state of tool support. We use a survey-based approach with aided recall focused on segmenting and contextualizing individual exploratory browsing sessions to conduct a mixed method analysis of everyday sensemaking sessions in the traditional desktop browser setting while preserving user privacy. We report data from our survey (n=111) collected in September, 2022, and use these results to update and deepen the rich literature on information seeking behavior and exploratory search, contributing new empirical insights into the time spent per week and distribution of that time across tasks, and the lack of externalization and tool-use despite widespread desire for support.