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KM 101

Organizing Content Using Information Foraging Theory

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Dennis Pearce

November 2025

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What is Information Foraging Theory (IFT)?

  • Developed by Card and Pirolli at Xerox PARC in the 1990s
  • Humans are “informavores”
  • We search for information in the same ways that animals forage for food
    • Optimizing resource costs
    • Optimizing opportunity costs
  • Based on Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT)

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What is Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT)?

A model that attempts to predict how animals behave when searching for food

Animals have evolved to get the most food with the least effort, subject to environmental constraints

Key components:

Patches Scent

Diet Enrichment

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Patches in OFT

  • Food sources are “patchy” (not evenly distributed)
  • Animals need to make decisions about how long to stay in one patch before moving to another (“within-patch” vs. “between-patch”)

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Patches in IFT

  • Information sources are “patchy” (email, MS Teams, SharePoint, Google Drives, shared drives, Slack channels)
  • Users have to make decisions about how long to stay in one repository or platform before moving to another

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Scent in OFT

  • Scent is the animal’s assessment of how likely it is to find food along this path
  • Decisions have to be made as to how far to go before turning around
  • The strength of the scent determines whether to continue or not

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Scent in IFT

  • Scent for informavores is all the cues they get when navigating a site (headers, folder names, menus, links)
  • Decisions have to be made as to how far to go before backtracking or giving up
  • Users will tolerate a large number of clicks if they feel they are making progress

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Diet in OFT

  • Animals have preferred diets but might shift them depending on circumstances and availability
  • The trade-off is: Do I accept what I have in front of me or continue looking for something better?

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Diet in IFT

  • Different users may have different “caloric” requirements
  • Are they looking for a blog post, presentation, research paper, book?
  • The amount of effort involved may cause them to choose something less than satisfactory

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Enrichment in OFT

  • As humans, we have the ability to overcome some of the hurdles foraging presents
  • Agriculture and animal domestication have allowed us to keep our food nearby rather than having to look for it
  • Selective breeding and understanding of genetics have made animals bigger and fatter, plants bigger and tastier

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Enrichment in IFT

  • We can bring information closer to us by designing our sites and repositories to make it easier to find and reach
  • For any given topic, we can provide a variety of levels of information to suit a variety of diets

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Enriching Our Information Environment

  • Between-Patch
    • Reduce the overall number of patches to choose from.
    • Agree on which patches are going to contain which content.
    • Create quick links on your intranet home page out to the various repositories your members use. Give them descriptive names so that it is clear why someone might click on one vs. another.
    • Think about implementing enterprise search so that content from different patches can be seen in a single set of search results.
    • Use widgets, tiles, web parts, etc. on web pages to display content from other sources that might be relevant to the topic at hand.

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Enriching Our Information Environment

  • Within-Patch
    • Use tags and metadata to allow content to be grouped in a variety of ways.
    • Pin commonly sought content to the top of the page.
    • Add promoted searches or use other methods of weighting content so that popular items come to the top of search results.
    • Set up rules for where discussions and comments happen so discussions are not fragmented.

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Enriching Our Information Environment

  • Scent
    • Make sure links on web pages have enough context so that it is clear to users what should be expected when they click on a link.
    • Similarly, use folder names that are descriptive enough so that users feel they are headed in the right direction when navigating the folder hierarchy.
    • Folder names should indicate categories that are mutually exclusive.
    • Use tools that provide navigation breadcrumbs so users can easily back out of a navigation path if it feels like it's the wrong one.

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Enriching Our Information Environment

  • Diet
    • Use tools that allow for filtering by filetype (presentation, spreadsheet, document, etc.)
    • Include terms in folder and file names along with metadata tags that can help searchers understand the kind of content they are about to open: "summary," "presentation," "white paper," "research article," "meeting notes," etc.
    • Where possible, provide links in documents or web pages to related content, so that users can move to something similar if the current item is not in line with their dietary requirements.

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Providing people with access to more information is not the problem. Rather, the problem is one of maximizing the allocation of human attention to information that will be useful.

- Pirolli and Card, “Information Foraging,” Psychological Review Vol 4 No 106, 1999

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References