When Effort Exceeds Expectations: A Theory of Search Task Difficulty

Despite widespread usage of the constructs of task complexity and task difficulty in the information science literature, there are no clear or consistent conceptual or operational definitions of these constructs, and no consensus on how to distinguish levels of complexity or difficulty within a set of search tasks.

In this talk, I will present a theory of search task difficulty that arose from results of a recent empirical study that evaluated a set of search tasks that were constructed using a cognitive complexity framework from educational theory.  While results of this study showed participants engaged in significantly more search activity when completing more cognitively complex tasks, they did not evaluate more cognitively complex tasks as more difficult, and were equally satisfied with their performances across tasks. These findings have led to a new theory of search task difficulty that is rooted in expectancy and appraisal theories, and differs from many current notions of search task difficulty that assume a linear relationship between search task difficulty and search behavior. The theory also has implications for how search task difficulty is measured.