“The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?” — Jaron Lanier (amen!)
(via scannedpages)
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream.” — Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
If book designs disrespected attention as much as websites do, they’d probably look like this.
My thoughts on cultivating user attention…
This is one of my favorite non-existant places in Chapel Hill. This lanscape architect’s office used to exist behind Penang restaurant, next to the old location of 3Cups but moved out a couple of years ago. Whenever I was over there, I’d look in the window and think about what it would be like if it were my office. Today, it’s my desktop wallpaper - a window into the past!
“The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols are natural and spontaneous products.” — Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
Designing for Attention
I’m not a fly. I’m just putting that out there. Not that there’d be anything wrong with it if I was. I mean, I’d be able to see across an almost complete 360 degrees! Sure, I’d have massive, grotesque, compound mirror-ball eyes, and sure, I’d probably get picked up by G-men and spend the rest of my days in a government lab, but I’d be able to focus on more than one thing at a time! Actually, I’d be the ideal web user. I could read an article while simultaneously reading all the other information on the page. I could divide my attention ten ways if I wanted. That’d be nice. But I’m not a fly, website designers, I’m a human! I only have two eyes, ok? I can only focus on one thing at a time. And you know what, I’m ok with that. I really am. I’m glad I can walk down the street without having to worry about scaring innocent children. So I just want to clear that up. I’m not a fly. I’m not even a “fly-person.” I’mjust a person. So, here’s my question: Why are most web pages designed for fly-people?
Designers, seriously, let’s make today the last day we create pages for fly-people. Instead of continuing to create confused, unclear and unfocused pages—pages that include more information than is necessary and in a way that undercuts their core purpose—let’s adopt a new standard, following a very simple rubric: enabling attention. Most of the ways in which we go about getting attention ensure that we will fail at keeping it. See, we’ve been adept atstealing the attention of viewers (ultimately from ourselves, mind you)—that eye-catching graphic, the moving advertisement, the blinking text, the many, many links to click—but we’re now learning that stolen attention never stays long. Lasting attention must be earned, and in order to earn attention, we must first respect it.
In designing for attention, there are two particular issues that we need to be concerned with: the “readability” of our pages, and the distance we expect web users to cross to reach information. Let’s get into it…
“I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.” — Dean Kamen (via)
I just read a description of a new project - being funded by the National Science Foundation - to develop what they call the “Neurophone system,” a direct brain to phone interface. I find it amazing that we’re awarding grants - regardless of how small they are in the grand scheme of things (Neurophone has received around $300K so far) - for projects like this when we have much more pressing problems that are far more worthy of immediate attention, problems that could certainly interrupt many of the assumed controls that concepts like the Neurophone likely depend upon. Things like electrical resources, a sufficiently idle market, or even the continued operation of entities able to dole out funding. In other words, a collapsed society doesn’t need brain phones.
What’s also irritating is to see “green rationalization” for these concepts in their abstracts. (The NeuroPhone promises “new energy-efficient techniques and algorithms for low-cost wireless EEG headsets and mobile phones,” among other things.) I’m fairly certain that our mobile phones aren’t at the top of the energy-inefficiency list, that is, as long as we have airplanes, cars, trucks, buses, buildings, homes, appliances, etc.
In my company, we are continually evaluating research and development on the basis of what is needed. Until the items of greatest need are supplied, we don’t even consider addressing anything that is purely a matter of “wouldn’t this be neat?” The skewed sense of priority that enables projects like this to be funded reminds me of much more clearly sad situations, like the dilapidated homes of gaming addicts, where the water has been shut off, the cupboards are bare, and the children are malnourished, yet the computers are running.
We need to get real.
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“More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities - that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. They reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.” — Robert Darnton, The Mysteries of Reading, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, page 173
“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.” — Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, page 44
(via scannedpages)
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