Designing for Attention in Social Systems

Presented at a Jive Engineering Lunch.

Transcript

1. Context & Attentional Focus Reducing Friction in Enterprise Social Networks Chris Rivard @chrisrivard
2. "Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus." Alexander Graham Bell
3. Focus “pay particular attention to” ! Concentration “the fixing of close, undivided attention” ! Attention “the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things”
4. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Herbert Simon Nobel Prize in Economics, 1978
5. 34 GB (Per day)
6. Situational Too much noise / publish then filter Ambient Too much signal / more signal needs more filters
7. Decay Theory Information is less available for later retrieval as time passes and memory, as well as memory strength, wears away
8. Consuming paradigms Email Activity streams Distributed cognition
9. Activity Streams?
10. Inbox?
11. Distributed Cognition Bridging situations of limited and plentiful attention
12. Ego depletion Q: What’s for dinner Friday night? A: Pizza.
13. Signaling
14. Situational Context “business value” value time Peak business value Long tail information decay
15. value time Ambient Context “culture” Increasing value
16. value time Context shift Get work done Magic happens here. Building culture
17. Getting Business Done.
18. Decision making. Decision making.
19. Some ideas (for designers)
20. ★ Interruption is severity scaled (scoped) ★ Tell the user how much information they’ve signed up for - and provide a way to tune ★ Visually indicate the impact of the user’s decisions (e.g. following a high activity user) ★ Adapt to changing work groups (who to unfollow)
21. ★ Provide the ability to pause the stream ★ Provide diagnostics to tell users where they are spending their time ★ Information triage (while you were away) ★ New user dossier (OODA) ★ Buffered interstitials (context switches)
22. ★ Too much information (default or paralysis) ★ Information decay (uncle ralph) ★ Ambient information (culture) ★ Cognitive bias (e.g. new over relevant) ★ Confirmation bias (filter for beliefs)
23. “Every interaction comes with a cost. Not in cash money, but in something worth even more: the attention of the person you're interacting with...” ! Seth Godin
24. Thank you for your attention. e/ clearwired@gmail.com ! t/ @chrisrivard