Search strategy is often unconscious and people don't think of themselves as seeking information.
To improve information seeking, people should become aware of when they are actually seeking information to solve a problem in life.
Noticing these moments can make people conscious that they are engaging in the activity of searching for information.
Marcia Bates is Professor Emerita in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies. Over the course of a long career in both consulting and academia, Dr. Bates produced seminal work in user-centered information system design. Her paper on “berrypicking” as a user search strategy has been widely cited and is considered a foundational text in the field. In this conversation, we discuss search systems.