On-Demand Serendipity

or How to Stem the Flow of Undesirable Data in Our Lives

Previous post: The Future of Context

Time and focus are the most precious resources of our digital lives, yet we’re systematically trained to squander them.

The torrent of information and notifications we’re subjected to is our own terribly efficient Skinner box that reinforces the behavior of compulsively checking feeds, social networks, messages and notifications in the hope of finding a nourishing, satisfying or useful piece of data. Checking without knowing whether the next bit will be interesting is like playing the lottery. And behaviors generating unpredictable outcomes are the most addictive to our brains.

Information addicts who can’t refrain from refreshing reddit, Twitter or Facebook, or from checking their phones for notifications, feel bad about it. Social sites are filled with self-deprecating humor from people who feel they’re wasting a significant part of their lives looking for intellectual or emotional nourishment online. Because of the huge amount of data that is continuously generated worldwide or even within our limited digital neighborhood, odds are that there often is something fulfilling waiting for our attention at any time of the day. The problem is that, in order to find it, we have to sift through the flotsam of Sturgeon’s law and that, by doing so, we increase the odds of perpetuating this behavior.

In a perfect world, new interesting and relevant information would be at our immediate disposal and interruptions would only occur if they were absolutely warranted. There would be an interest threshold that services would be able to gauge before suggesting content, instead of saddling the user with the time-consuming cognitive burden of evaluating every piece of incoming data. As I explained in my previous post, allowing services to make such decisions requires them to have a better model of their user and a better understanding of their current mental state. And the best way of doing so is not by just guessing but by establishing an interaction protocol that lets the user confirm, infirm or explicitly communicate such states.

We don’t behave with our friends like we do with our colleagues, our fellow fans or hobbyists, or our family. Throughout the day, we adopt and shed personas as social conventions demand or the mood strikes us. A purpose-driven user experience would tailor incoming data and interruptions to the user’s current personas. Furthermore, it would allow them to easily select their current personas, while informing them of which ones require their attention. Here’s a crude mock-up of a possible persona selection screen:

Notifications are sorted by personas. Indeed, it makes very little sense to sort notifications and data using apps as a criterion. Having a reminder that tells me that I have 5 unread emails carries almost no information for me; it just serves to increase my stress level.

Rich context analysis — as described in the previous post — would propose (or pre-select) relevant personas for the user. For instance, when the user is at their work location, it would automatically activate all the work-related personas by default. The user would also be able to manually select their active personas from such a screen.

For then on, the user’s potential interactions and interruptions would not be selected by mere availability, but by their importance to the active personas. In the above example, the user is at work and most of the non-work-related personas are deselected. They won’t be interrupted by data related to those. The user has also chosen to always receive important notifications from Elsa and the system has determined that a time-sensitive persona (handling the arrangements for tonight’s movie) should be activated.

This system works the same way for information and media consumption: if the user wanted to hear about the latest in wine tasting, they would just have to activate their wine tasting persona. They would have immediate access to all the unread data collected from their various feeds and sources that is related to wine tasting. They would also now receive wine tasting-related notifications. In essence, the digital world would respond to their declared interest by providing them with what they are interested in right now. On-demand serendipity: the ability to find the conversation you want to take part in, the media you want to consume, new information about a topic of importance to you; all these automatically pushed to you, at your behest.

Information overload and constant interruptions create an unhealthy mental and emotional environment. An AI-powered and purpose-driven user experience will change the way we treat incoming data: not as an overwhelming torrent, but as a context and user-curated stream that only delivers what we want and need, when we want and need it.