Behaviour characteristics: low and high literacy users information seeking on social service websites.

This paper describes the behaviour characteristics of low and high literacy users, information seeking of an on-line social service system. The finding of this paper is based on the qualitative study which involves ten volunteers participated in this study. To classify these participants within the literacy scale, National Skills for Life Survey is used. According to this survey, five volunteers are classified as high literate; and the remaining were as low literate. All participants were asked to think-aloud whilst carrying out the information search using the "Adviceguide" website. The four information search tasks were of varying difficulty; easy, medium and difficult. Observations, video recording and a semi-structured interview technique that use cognitive probes were used. The qualitative data were transcribed and analysed using Grounded Theory and Emergent Themes Analysis approach. The eight characteristics of what identified; Verification, Reading, Recovery, Trajectories, Focus, Satisfied, Representation and Abandon. Results showed that low and high literacy users demonstrated critically different behaviour characteristics.

10th International Conference NZ Chapter of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction.
Auckland, New Zealand, 2009.