Serendipitous Finding
An unsought finding that the user did not set out to obtain but recognizes as valuable once it appears during interaction. Distinguished from a sought answer by its incidental, unplanned origin.
Operational Definition
EVENT. One occurrence would be coded when a user turn flags an AI output as valuable while also indicating it was outside the stated goal of the current request (e.g. 'I wasn't looking for that, but that's useful'). The serendipity-flagging turn is the unit counted.
Measurement Schema
Proposed measurement protocol (not yet empirically validated): Rater coding of user turns for two co-present features, expressed value and explicit off-goal origin, against the session's stated task; agreement would be assessed via Cohen's kappa. Complementary self-report: users tag outputs as 'unexpected and useful'. Could be reported as serendipitous-finding events per session.