Kalbach devotes a good part of Chapter Two to discussing the emotional aspects of information retrieval and web navigation. He then discusses a schema outlined by Carol Kuhlthau of Rutgers describing the typical arc of emotional responses in web searches.
The details of the schema are to my mind uninteresting, simply because they seem to assume a user performing a known-item search (interestingly, the concrete example Kalbach cites a couple of pages later purporting to apply Kuhlthau’s methods deviates from his earlier summary in significant ways). The overall message, however, is vital, and one that I think most web users will find familiar - a general emotional trajectory of optimism as a search begins; a sense of disappointment or frustration as the result set shows you that the task is not as simple as you thought it was; followed by growing confidence and optimism as you winnow these results down. The ideal, it seems, would be to minimize the sense of unhappiness felt in stage two - either by pre-winnowing the result set or, if this is impossible/undesirable, by some other means. It could presumably be possible to indicate that the breadth of material returned helps to solve the ‘not knowing what you need to know’ problem identified by Donna Maurer …
Design Observer
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