Three important determinants of user performance for database retrieval

Abstract

Three important factors that determine user performance during database retrieval are representation realism, expressive ease, and task complexity. Representation realism is the level of abstraction used when formulating queries. Expressive ease is the syntactic flexibility permitted when formulating queries. Task complexity is the level of difficulty of queries. A controlled laboratory experiment was conducted to assess the effects of these three factors on user productivity during database retrieval. The independent variables were representation realism (high versus low), expressive ease (high versus low), and query complexity (simple versus complex). The dependent variables were query accuracy and query time. Results show that all these three factors significantly affected user performance during database retrieval. However, their relative impact on query accuracy and query time differed. Moreover, these factors interacted in unique ways to moderate query accuracy and query time. Besides verifying prior empirical findings, these results offer several suggestions for future research and development work in the area of database retrieval.