Effects of Position and Time Bias on Understanding Onsite Users' Behavior

The existence of different biases in logged users' behavior makes it difficult to extract realistic topical and social information from users' interaction logs (e.g., query logs). To understand users' behavior and their interests in the cultural heritage domain, we have logged onsite user interaction logs of visits in a museum. This prompts the question on the reliability of the social information being gathered from the onsite logs: How does the position of museum objects affect users' behavior in the museum? How does order of visiting point of interests affect their dwell-time in front of each point of interest? How do different users' characteristics affect their behavior in the museum? In short, what are different kinds of biases that should be considered in the onsite logs? Our main findings are the following: First, there is a considerable position bias, which is due to the design of the exhibition and should be considered during extraction of social signals from the log. Second, there is a bias in the amount of time that users spend for interacting with the point of interests and the order of picking them to visit. This shows a fatigue on users' interactions while they are reaching to the end of the exhibition. Third, we find out some variations among the users' visit, which shows context is an important factor to consider while using onsite logs for different purposes.