"Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research in the last decade." --Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, and author, Designing Web Usability
"This is a wonderful and exceptionally interesting book." --Marc Mangel, Professor and Fellow, John Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
"... a significant achievement in both science and engineering ... It will be a classic ... a deep and substantial body of work, conveyed with clarity and erudition." -- George W. Furnas, Professor and Associate Dean, School of Information, University of Michigan
Information Foraging Theory is an approach to understanding how strategies and technologies for information seeking, gathering, and consumption are adapted to the flux of information in the environment. The theory assumes that people, when possible, will modify their strategies or the structure of the environment to maximize their rate of gaining valuable information. Field studies inform the theory by illustrating that people do freely structure their environments and their strategies to yield higher gains in information foraging.
