Toward a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between situated action and planned action models of behavior in information retrieval contexts: contributions from phenomenology

In human-computer interaction (HCI), a successful interaction sequence can take its own momentum and drift away from what the user has originally planned. However, this does not mean that planned actions play no important role in the overall performance. In this paper, the author tries to construct a line of argument to demonstrate that it is impossible to consider an action without an a priori plan, even according to the phenomenological position taken for granted by the situated action theory. Based on the phenomenological analysis of problematic situations and typification the author argues that, just like "situated-ness", "plannedness" of an action should also be understood in the context of the situation. Successful plan can be developed and executed for familiar context. The first part of the paper treats information seeking behavior as a special type of social action and applies Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of sociology to understand the importance and necessity of plan. The second part reports results of a quasi-experiment focusing on plan deviation within an information seeking context. It was found that when the searcher's situation changed from problematic to non-problematic, the degree of plan deviation decreased significantly. These results support the argument proposed in the first part of the paper.