is the web a smelly place?

One group is based at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre in California, and is led by Ed Chi and Stuart Card. Dr Chi and Dr Card take their inspiration from the science of ecology. Dr Card, a cognitive psychologist, reckons that a user “forages” through a website in search of a piece of information in a manner similar to that employed by an animal foraging through a forest in search of food. Watch the user’s foraging behaviour (his “clickpath”) closely enough, and you can work out what “scent” he is chasing, and thus what kind of information he is after.

(via xplane.)