Understanding How People use Search to Support their Everyday Creative Tasks

Creativity is an essential part of people's daily life and work across a range of everyday tasks. However, little prior work has explored how people use search engines and information resources as part of their creative processes, and how systems might better support users working on creative tasks. In this paper, we conducted an online survey with 175 participants to explore how people use search engines and online resources (e.g., images, videos, and social media) to support their creative tasks. Our participants reported information seeking to support a broad range of everyday creativity including tasks in arts, writing, crafts, and technical projects. Our findings show that participants' tasks included multiple stages of creative processes (e.g., creating ideas, combining ideas, executing plans) and that participants reported using search engines along with other tools (such as images and videos) to facilitate their creative process. By using Bayesian random effects regression models, we found that different stages of the creative process influence participants' use of tools. For example, for tasks that involved creating ideas, participants were more likely to use images and social sites, and when needing to put ideas into practice they were more likely to use videos. We also found differences in users' satisfaction with using the tools for different creative stages. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for supporting users' information seeking needs during creative tasks.