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SNIF-ACT Home
SNIF-ACT (Scent-based Navigation
and Information Foraging in the ACT architecture) is
a computational cognitive model developed to simulate
users as they perform unfamiliar information-seeking
tasks on the World Wide Web (WWW).F The main goal of
developing SNIF-ACT is to provide insights and engineering
principles for improving usability. More directly it
could provide automated cognitive engineering tools.
SNIF-ACT could also serve as the basis for user models
embedded in systems and devices to improve interaction,
and it could serve as the basis for helping people to
learn how to find, make sense of, and use information
to improve solutions to significant everyday problems
involving health, finance, career, and so on.
SNIF-ACT
is based on a theoretical integration of Information
Foraging Theory and ACT-R.
Particularly important is the concept of information
scent, which characterizes how users evaluate the
utility of hypermedia actions. SNIF-ACT has been developed
with a user-trace methodology for studying and analyzing
the psychology of users performing ecologically valid
WWW tasks. A
user trace
is a record of all significant states and events in
the user-WWW interaction based on eye tracking data,
application-level logs, and think-aloud protocols.
A user-tracing
architecture has been implemented for developing
simulation models of user-WWW interaction and for comparing
SNIF-ACT simulations against user-trace data.
The user tracing architecture compares each action
of the SNIF-ACT simulation directly against observed
user actions.
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