“Just one second, officer, I am on the phone.”
In today‘s world we are constantly inundated by information. It‘s a plague affecting the very core of our lives. Thanks to the advent of modern technology we can reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. In order to escape from this plague, we must physically and deliberately take ourselves off the grid.
You know the routine… you check your email like your life depended on it. You answer your mobile phone and Skype calls like the president was calling. You respond to your IMs and SMSs like you‘re playing Whac-a-Mole. To hell with the person knocking on your front door or the police officer knocking at your car window, you‘ve got technology to respond to!
Sometimes it feels like we‘re in a technology trance. We get that glazed-over look when we sit in front of the TiVo or computer. If we are lucky enough, we have a good spouse to whack us over the head when we are not paying attention.
The web 2.0 Era
“Jimmy doesn‘t know you, but he wants to be your friend because you and him live in the same country. Click here to accept this relationship.”
With the advent and hype of the web 2.0 era it seems that not only are the more common devices begging for our attention, but so are web sites. I can‘t count the number of times I have seen some email telling me that someone has posted something to a web site, or that someone wanted to be my friend or colleague. With some of these sites, it‘s near impossible to turn these features off. We are constantly flooded with this kind of attention-getting information and the best (or so it seems) we can do to band-aid it is to set up a bunch of complex email filters so you can tend to those emails when you have time.
Quick Facts
- 1.4 Billion – The number of active email mailboxes worldwide
- 944 Million – The number of IM accounts worldwide
- 16.4 Megabytes – The average amount of data sent/received via email per corporate email user per day.
- 71% – The percent of spam email messages sent worldwide per day
- 14 Million – The installed base of wireless email
Source: The Radicati Group, Inc., June 2006 – Volume 3 Issue 4
At the rate we are going, technology and information will run us over, leaving us nothing more than a small smudge mark in the middle of the road. In our final days we will look back and wonder where all of our time went over the years. We will begin to question why we were embedding our very souls into a system instead of freely embracing life.
I used to think it was solely the responsibility of an Information Architect to ensure that our users are not flooded with information. That it was the IA‘s job to be the voice of reason and the driving force behind simplifying the lives of not just users, but people. I was wrong.
With the thousands of social network sites, blog communities, and web based applications out there, and the thousands more than join those ranks each day, the lone IA can no longer be the single force behind the movement for simplicity and ease of use in information and technology. This job has extended in the very core of what we do as web professionals and it is now the job of the designer, the developer, the programmer, the project manager, the account manager, and the system administrator as well.
Putting the Solution before the Problem
Now, just to be clear here. I am not against technology or information. I love sites that help make my life easier. I love technologies that simplify the things that I have to do. I love getting the right information at the right time. But it seems to me that most of the “solutions” rolling out these days are not solving any real-world problems, they are not making people‘s lives easier, and they are certainly not delivering the right information at the right time. They are putting the solution before the problem. At Blue Flavor we call this “Solutioneering.” This kind of thinking in the industry leads me to believe that we are just drinking the Kool-Aid.
This reminds me of the times when getting number one on specific search engine keywords was one of the most important things a web site could do, second only to getting more traffic. History shows that you can get all the traffic in the world but it may not do you any good. It‘s the right traffic that counts. And let‘s face it, it‘s not traffic at all, it‘s people. Getting the right people to your site who are interested in what information you can provide them at a time they need it is the measure of a successful web site.
Measuring Success with web Analytics
Real success can be measured. One of the most unique features of the web, and one that is often overlooked, is the fact that we can measure the performance of our solutions. We can pull down server and search logs and run them through analytics tools to show us the numbers.
The numbers are important because you can track the traffic and where it‘s dropping off. For example if you are constantly ranked in the #1 slot for a specific phrase or keyword on a search engine and you get tons of traffic from that phrase or keyword but they only stay around for about 10 seconds before disappearing, that says something.
Measuring Success with User Research
We can also use methods found in other more traditional spaces. I am, of course, talking about actually asking the users. Talking to the people who use your web site and finding out if the changes you made really helped make the site easier to use, more useful, and thus more valuable.
Talking to the people who use your site and even more importantly the people who use your product or service is important because it helps unearth problems with the site that you have overlooked or dismissed previously. Remember, this is a open discussion with people. It shouldn‘t be treated like an experiment on lab rats. The qualitative response is what you want to get; the quantitative response is something that that web analytics takes care of.
web analytics has been around for years, and just within the last year or so it‘s begun to gain some traction within businesses. Customer research has been around far longer than most of us and has often been dismissed when it comes time to set the web site‘s budget. While it‘s true that web sites can get stuck in what some call analysis paralysis, its important to at least once look at the numbers and listen to the people before moving forward.
Conclusion
In the beginning of the web era or as others put it, the information age, technology and information was once pitched as a great benefit by helping us solve big problems. Today the inverse is true: with the influx of information that reaches us assisted by technology has been proven to cause more problems than it solves them. Instead of avoiding the problem by un-plugging and removing ourselves from the grid, we should be trying to do something about it. We should rethink not only how but why we go about building new web sites and web applications. We need to consider the people who have problems that need to be solved instead of trying to invent problems that align with our solutions, products, and services. We can reduce the information overload by making fewer web sites that are more and more useful in our daily lives.
Resources
Information Overload on Wikipedia
AttentionTrust.org
Web Analytics Association
Marketing Research Association
The Information Architecture Institute
The User Experience Network
The Radicati Group
Hey Nick,
Excellent article. I especially like the idea of extending the IA into the entire design cycle, though I’m sure there are some designers out there who would rather something be pretty than functional.
How much do you think the lack of standardization across “web 2.0” contributes to this noise? If users are forced to not only track information, but learn an entirely new system of getting that information each time they sign up for a new service, how much of that type of behavior contributes to our ability to process/respond to technology?
And what can we do? Can we standardize “web 2.0”? Are people running too fast to come together on something like this? Would it help?
Nick, yes a truely great article. I broke out of my information routine last night and it was awesome. No, IM, no email, left the cell phone at home. I’m planning to do it more just for some sanity. I turned off RSS a long time ago for this very reason.
Sean, in regards to standardization I have hope that the microformat movement might be able to help. I don’t see there becoming less websites or services demanding our attention, but if they can all start to talk more to each other in a consitent way it would help reduce the information tsunami.
I am not 100% sure there is a major lack of standardization across Web 2.0… I think there is a general lack of standardization across all of the web.
You probably already know about this, but on the off chance you don’t, I’d check into some of the work done by Thomas Vander Wal and Jay Feinberg. They are both working to solve the information exchange problem to some degree or another.
Sure, this doesn’t solve the “learning a new interface every time” problem, but this is the current state of the web in general.. not something specifically exclusive to the Web 2.0 world.
I think “Web 2.0” as a term has been bastardized enough as it is. I am not sure it will live much longer.. but the core principals behind what it is will be entrenched in our work from hear out.