Three important determinants of user performance for database retrieval

Three important factors that determine user performance during database ret rieval are representation realism, expressive ease, and task complexity. Re presentation realism is the level of abstraction used when formulating quer ies. Expressive ease is the syntactic flexibility permitted when formulatin g queries. Task complexity is the level of difficulty of queries. A control led laboratory experiment was conducted to assess the effects of these thre e factors on user productivity during database retrieval. The independent v ariables were representation realism (high versus low), expressive ease (hi gh 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 retri eval. However, their relative impact on query accuracy and query time diffe red. Moreover, these factors interacted in unique ways to moderate query ac curacy and query time. Besides verifying prior empirical findings, these re sults offer several suggestions for future research and development work in the area of database retrieval (C) 1999 Academic Press.