Hyper-searchers Search Much More for their Files Because Navigation is More Difficult for Them

There are two main ways to retrieve files: hierarchical navigation and query-based search. File retrieval studies have consistently found a preference for navigation over search. However, a minority of people, referred to as hyper-searchers, perform far more searches than others. The purpose of this study was to measure the cognitive effort of navigation and search for hyper-searchers and compare it to the control group, as part of a larger research project aimed to discover why hyper-searchers search much more than the rest of the population. Participants were selected for the hyper-searchers group (n = 50) and for the control group (n = 50) using a double-check group allocation method which included both estimation and observation. We measured the cognitive effort of navigation and search by using the dual-task paradigm. Findings indicate that navigation was more difficult for hyper-searchers than for the rest of the population, and while navigating is easier than searching for the rest of the population, this is not true of hyper-searchers. This evidence forms a causal connection between hyper-searchers’ file disorganization (found previously) and their high search percentage: Hyper-searchers’ files are less organized, therefore it is harder for them to navigate than the rest of the population, causing them to search for their files much more than the rest of the population. This is the first study that compared the cognitive effort of hyper-searchers when navigating and searching and compared the findings to a control group representing the rest of the population.