The user in the evaluation process Information seeking tasks are at the centre of much computer-mediated work. Sometimes these tasks are curiosity-driven, but most often they are spawned to support a primary goal, perhaps to prepare a budgetary report, to fix a mistake in a design drawing, or to resolve a misconception about a programming language feature. The important goal may be less to assign a utility coefficient than to understand how IR tools are actually used. These monitoring tasks may be the bottleneck to overall performance, yet the only way to discover such bottlenecks is to observe people at work.
People often use technology in unexpected ways.
This surprise, however, could not have been discovered without a commitment to investigating real work practice. One reason, then, for taking an activity-centred view of IR evaluation is to test one's assumptions about what aspects of a tool are important. Studying cognition in practice can change a designer's assumptions about the strengths and weaknesses of the artefacts he provides. This slogan means that empirical studies of human skill can provide designers with a non-trivial understanding of how people struggle to complete tasks. With this understanding comes insight and inspiration for design.