A study of Users’ Image Seeking Behaviour in Flickling

Abstract

This study aims to explore users' image seeking behaviour when searching for a known, non-annotated image in Flickling provided by iCLEF2008 track. The task assigned to users was to search for the three first images given after first login. Users did not know in advance in which of the six languages (English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian) the images were described, forcing them to search across languages. The main focus of our study was threefold: a) to identify the reasons that determined users' choice over a specific interface, b ) to examine whether users were thinking about languages when searching for images and to what extent and c) to examine if used, how helpful the translations proved to be for finding the images. This study used four different, both quantitative and qualitative methods (questionnaires, retrospective thinking aloud, observation and interviews) to meet its research questions. Results show that two out of ten users were using only the monolingual interface because they did not feel confident with languages and the rest were switching between interfaces for a variety of reasons in which languages played a small part. Only four out of ten users were actually thinking about languages when searching for the images, while the rest were more preoccupied with finding the images and completing the task successfully. As a consequence, only four users paid attention to translations and only judged the translations in languages known to them. Overall, the translations were not considered to be helpful due to their inconsistency in coverage and their tendency to lead to irrelevant results.