Which team benefits from collaboration?: Investigating collaborative information seeking using personal and social contextual signals

Collaboration often involves looking for information together to achieve a common goal, such as a collaborative search task. A general expectation in collaboration is that through working together, participants obtain better outcomes than those achieved by individual efforts. However, this is not always true and certain collaborative teams benefit more from collaboration than others. This study aims to identify the settings in which teams perform the best in exploratory search tasks. Specifically, this study considers a variety of social signals to characterize individuals (e.g. number of phone calls, number of sms messages) and identify the pairs of individuals who are likely to perform best in collaborative information seeking tasks. Based on an exploratory multi‐method study (N=35) involving “in‐the‐wild” phone data collection for two weeks and one in‐lab search session, we report that: (1) the difference in social activities between the collaborators' daily lives was found to be associated with collaborative information seeking performance and (2) one member of a team – one who has lower social interaction – might significantly influence the outcomes for the team. The results pave way for future study design and analysis in the area of sensor‐enhanced collaborative information seeking.