Is Too Much Information a Bad Thing?
Dealing with being overwhelmed by information.
We are all used to living in this day and age where the information flows like never before. Some of us are enjoying it, and some of us are hating it. Some don’t think about it.
The fact is that the amount of information that a person processes in an average day today is magnitudes greater than just 100 years ago.
What about a hundred years from now? Our brains, being the all-powerful computers they are, have evolved to deal with tremendous streams of information. But today, in our always-online, interconnected world, the first cracks are starting to show.
Is all that information a good or a bad thing? As with most things in life, the answer is “It depends”. We are seeing an exponential growth in technology, but as humans, as a civilization — we don’t evolve as fast.
So, the question is this — if you start getting emerged in all that information noise from the day you are born, do you grow up to be extra smart? Or do you grow up to be extra distracted? A casual glance at the world tells you that — for the most part — it is the latter.
The information noise we are exposed to every day is turning us into… oh, look a squirrel!
Oh right, where were we… the fact that there’s so much information and that most of it aren’t really important is driving our brains nuts. Our attention spans are in a steady decrease. We are constantly switching context — which our brain hates — to the effect that we are always multitasking, concentrating on various things, but in a shallow manner. It seems that the hardest thing for people to face is the inability to deeply focus on only one thing for a prolonged period of time.
Using myself as an example, even though I have trained my mind to be able to concentrate pretty well, I crave information. When I decide to spend the morning with zero electronics, just drinking coffee and relaxing, I can almost physically feel the need for a stream of information to keep my mind busy. It’s like a drug.
Is it time to do something about it?
We are both producing and consuming huge amounts of data, growing exponentially each year.
Having all that data at our disposal is an amazing thing. We want that. But we need to devise better ways of consuming that data. If you’ve ever read an article about UX, you know that you shouldn’t design experiences that overwhelm users with data, but rather present it in small, logical chunks.
We should apply a similar approach to the way we go about our daily lives. We shouldn’t stand for being bombarded with information. We need to start carefully designing our information experiences.
At NoiseCheck, we are striving to design such natural information interfaces — that will empower you, instead of overwhelming and exhausting you. Our vision is the world where everyone has access to immense amounts of real time-data, yet so perfectly architected and presented that you can deeply understand it at a glance.
How do we get there?
There’s a lot of research of how people interact and understand the data presented to them in an interface. It’s an important part of UX. But here’s the thing — most of that research is focused on answering the question “How do we make the user buy something?”. There is much less focus on how to best architect the information for users to deeply and easily understand it. Really understand it, and be able to use it to smartly drive everyday life decisions.
At NoiseCheck, we are reimagining the foundations of what it means to design an information interface. We are focusing on true, functional assimilation of data, while still making it pretty and easy to use.
We are working on the interfaces of the future.
