When more is less: designing for the overwhelmed
We have a responsibility to design for the overwhelmed. We also need to reconsider mechanisms and scale of information in an era of hyper-change.
The amount of information we have been producing and consuming has been increasing at a greater rate for some time, via a number of revolutions. The impacts of this are felt widely, but there are some recent developments indicating we may be reaching biological and social capacity. We are seing emerging signals of conscious consumption as well as greater demand on organisations to support us in our quest to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed — of course, this reaction is not even or universal.
“We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.” — John Culkin (1967)
Ironically, I want to start this piece with some statistical information about information.
- A 2011 study found Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986
- YouTube usage more than tripled from 2014–2016 with users uploading 400 hours of new video each minute of every day!
- In 2014, It was estimated that the world’s capacity to store information digitally reached 5 zettabytes (five trillion gigabytes). Up from 0.432 zettabytes global total in 1986 (less than 540 MB per person). Some predict that in 2025 the global data-sphere will reach 163 zettabytes.
- Between the year 0 and 1600 AD it is believed the worlds stored information doubled (mostly in the form of written texts). Some predict we are approaching it doubling every 12 hours currently.
- 90% of the data on the internet has been created in the last 2 years.
- It is estimated we currently create as much data every 2 days as we did from the beginning of civilisation until 2013.
- Some analysts are suggesting the digital universe will be 40 times bigger by 2020!
The amount of information we are producing, and consuming is increasing exponentially. At the same time, we are constantly ‘wiring up’ and creating more connections than ever, adding to the signals and noise. I’m now connected to thousands of people on Instagram or LinkedIn, hundreds on Facebook or WhatsApp. But the fundamentals of our human structures and patterns stay the same — one of which is that we can only properly maintain a stable social network of around 150 people (the Dunbar Number), and even then, we can only establish close relationships with a fraction of that amount. This rough capacity exists biologically, our brains just aren’t built to handle more. In addition to this, our social protocols, institutions, and historical requirements have evolved around our biological capacities, adding an additional but potentially necessary constraint on our capacity.
There is a physical limit
Despite the impressive complexity and processing power of the human brain, its capacity is severely limited. Our brains have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost; we can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing is making us tired.
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120 bits per second. It’s also estimated it takes about 60bps to properly pay attention to someone talking to us — half of our conscious capacity. The rest must be split between everything else that is happening around and to us. Other studies have shown that we can only keep a few (about 7, or maybe even less) isolated items in ‘working memory’ — indicating clear limits. The other limit we face is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and this isn’t changing anytime soon.
Many years ago, we lived in larger families and smaller towns. Villages in earlier civilisations would roughly follow the 150 people capacity. They grew larger when certain ‘technologies’ (e.g. participatory representation, transport, efficient food systems, etc) allowed them to, but smaller neighbourhoods and housing clusters existed within them. Now we have workplaces with tens of thousands that are constantly in flux, cities with millions of people that have been built in enclaves, and information networks with billions of nodes and ‘influencers’ designed to grab our focus or our data. On top of this we are now ‘always wired’ and there is a constant battle for our attention from highly intelligent services and ever more crafty brands.
The battle for attention has its casualties
Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism as essential in keeping us safe. It determines which aspects of the environment we respond to, and is constantly active when we are awake, in the background and outside of our consciousness.
“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence 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” (Simon 1971).
I often use the phrase ‘Attention is the currency of the digital age’ as a way of demonstrating the importance. However, on reflection there are some issues with this statement. It has always been one of the most important resources we have, but now it is much more likely to be targeted strategically, manipulated widely and traded. This process has become increasingly involuntary.
Involuntary attention must have been at one time a profoundly adaptive force, as it automatically directed an organism’s information processing toward things of importance in the environment. In the modern world, however, much of what is involuntarily interesting is not important. We no longer need to be on the lookout for dangerous predators while we are hunting for food. In a world where the interesting may no longer be important and the important may no longer be interesting, a strange thing has happened.
Our brain hasn’t changed much — ‘We basically have the same brain as a ‘well-fed Roman’.
“Our brains are equipped to deal with the world the way it was many thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers”, “Back then the amount of information that was coming at us was much less and it came at us much more slowly.” — Daniel Levitin
But the environment has changed considerably, leading to information overload and/or loss of attention. Continuous partial attention puts us in a constant state of crisis, making us feel overwhelmed and unfulfilled. This overload occurs both at the personal level and the group or organisational level. Many factors can affect the likelihood of being overloaded, such as;
- Amount of information available
- Information processing capacity
- Complexity or ambiguity of the information
- Quality of the information
- Complexity of task or level of interruption
- Previous experience
- Cognitive style (or ‘culture’ and decision making style for an organisational context)
- Time spent ‘wired-in’ and intensity of connection
- Perceived level of control
As designers, we have an influence on almost all of these factors, and some of them we even have level of responsibility for. As a result, the concept of designing and strategising to reduce overload, the sense of being overwhelmed and giving back some attention capacity is central to the evolution of our craft.
Infobesity, infoxication, information glut, and data smog
In the past, many organisations have envisaged and built information systems based on a mislabelled problem of ‘information scarcity’ when the problem might have been ‘attention scarcity’. When asked to design new information heavy systems, we need to ask the right questions and focus in on what is actually required to complete the task.
Our anxiousness to have an abundance of information to deal with complexity inherent in our organisations has had unintended consequences. These include; reduced shared understanding of what is important, increased overhead, ignoring intuition and ultimately resulting in an overload of data that isn’t used for decision making or action taking.
Recently we partnered with a large bank to help them develop a new ‘information system’ and dashboard for their employees. The goal was to make the consumption and understanding of this critical information more broadly shared — essentially helping all employees become attuned to what the data was showing and therefore decreasing risk.
In our initial research (human centred) we noticed that the ‘power-users’ were afraid to let go of the information and data they had become accustomed (addicted) to. But through a phased approach and very deliberate discovery of what information was actually important, we prototyped and built a system that was much more sophisticated in how information was filtered and ultimately presenting minimal data — just enough to support decision making and intuition. The power users were initially very sceptical, but the result was rapid adoption, excellent feedback and a bank that now had many more employees (a factor of 100) able to ‘speak the language’. The power users also told us they didn’t think it was possible to have less but do more.
Acting more in tune
Stepping back and trying to rethink the reasoning behind our information habits is quite useful. Many advancements that have helped to create the information tsunami may also hold the key to aleviating the pain.
This capacity can be demonstrated via our experience with alarms. When the mechanical alarm was first being implimented we had a very limited set of mechanisms to create the sound, and therefore the range of sound produced. So we have a quite a narrow (and culturally defined) expectation for what an alarm is. Today we are surrounded by toots, beeps and screeches. This can lead to ‘alarm fatigue’ and ignoring the actual reason for the alarm. But now we have the ability to alert and inform in so many more ways. These might be more ambient, instructional, or even hidden (taken off the thinking list). The alarms can also be more self aware, and pick their timing or modify depending on what else is happening.
How can we use this lesson to shape our information environment more intentionally? What can we now make more ambient, personalised, invisible or just remove?
We also have responsibility for the collected data, and actions taken with that data. It’s in our power to design systems that use vast amounts of data to directly target individuals with personalised messages and actions, but with this power, comes the responsibility to consider the broader impact on the individual (or group). What else is happening for that individual? Is this critical? Are we adding to the noise or feeling of control? If we apply our ‘Service Design’ principles, we can increase the chance of spotting impact. But to be true to our responsibilities we should apply systems thinking and ‘ecosystem design’ mindsets and skill-sets.
I believe we need to grow and apply our understanding of the psychological and social causes and impacts of being overwhelmed and overloaded, pausing in our work to ask the right questions, seeking insights and providing advice when we can. Considering things like;
- ‘Cognitive ergonomics’
- Applying mindfulness
- Enabling digital detoxing & stimulus holidays
- ‘Taking things off the thinking list’
- Deliberately designing for the unfocused and distracted (or helping people to wander and daydream)
- Undertaking employee & workplace experience design programs
- A “neuro-audit’ of an organisations impact on customers or employees
- Moving away from designing products that solve one problem in one context at a time
- Not starting with the assumption that we are optimising for rapid, unbounded growth
- Looking for more ways to scale growth than just ‘reaching people’ or ‘getting attention’
We have a responsibility to work with our clients to explore when we may be creating the conditions for overload, when we may misdiagnose information deficits with attention deficits and look for opportunities to reduce noise. This is an evolved form of detoxing.
“We make things. And everything we make takes up space, creates noise or competes for attention”… “What do we want to spend more time with? What do we want to shape us? What nourishes us?” — Wilson Miner
We are at the beginning of an ever faster rate of hyper-change. The biggest and fastest changes in history. At the same time that we’re drowning in information, we’re also expected to process it faster. That’s not how it works.
Leigh Whittaker
Transformational Strategist / Experience Designer / Ambassador for seeing new possibilities / Explorer of the world
