Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.
To say that Web users behave like wild beasts in the jungle sounds like a joke, but there’s substantial data to support this claim. Animals make decisions on where, when, and how to eat on the basis of highly optimized formulas. Not that critters run mathematical computations, but rather that suboptimal behaviors result in starvation, and thus fewer offspring that follow those behaviors in subsequent generations. After thousands of generations, optimal food-gathering behavior is all that’s left.
Humans are under less evolutionary pressure to improve their Web use, but basic laziness is a human characteristic that might be survival-related (don’t exert yourself unless you have to). In any case, people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort. That’s what makes information foraging a useful tool for analyzing online media.
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox)
