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IA
Column
Pace,
Timing and Rhythm in Information Architecture
by
Andrew Dillon
Increasingly
the technologies of information which mediate our routine
activities seem to have been built on a simplistic presumption
of efficiency, the belief that faster is always better, that
speed is the single most important criterion in user
satisfaction or adoption. Notwithstanding the volume of
empirical evidence that would throw doubt on this presumption,
there is a more compelling reason for questioning what is
driving information architecture in the early 21st century. Most
of us do not rely solely on one application or even one
computing device. Many of us are, as users at this moment in
time, probably in possession of half a dozen information devices
implemented on separate hardware (think office computer, laptop,
home computer, mobile phone, PDA, and you see a huge potential
list before you even start to consider the information devices
we use for entertainment or add in the processing power of
current automobiles). Many of these (most of them?) do not even
recognize each other and require us to either maintain multiple
copies of the same information on different devices or to keep
single devices around for the unique contribution each makes to
our activities.
But
more than this, the whole efficiency paradigm has brought with
it, or at the very least reflects, the ideology of instancy:
rapid, continuous, updatable access with its commensurate faith
in staying connected and contemporary. Almost no comment is made
on the inevitable background tasks that must be performed just
to get most information devices to work as intended or the costs
associated with being permanently logged in. At the University
of Texas we now advise junior faculty that they should not keep
email open when in their office; instead they should
deliberately and methodically set three times a day to check
their inboxes and to reply to important messages, then switch
off, freeing themselves to concentrate on what they were hired
to do: teach and research. How odd that less than two decades
ago this technology of communication was not even available to
most of us, and now, apparently, we find users so tied up in its
use that we have to warn them to take time out if they wish to
be productive.
As
an email addict, (yes, I get withdrawal symptoms too) it strikes
me as quite amazing how easily we have overlooked the compulsive
power of information architecture to demand attention. We are
conditioned to thinking of such designs as successful. Websites
are supposed to be sticky, they are supposed to change often
enough that users are drawn back and, once there, discouraged
from leaving. In an information universe that knows no time or
space barriers, failure to attend quickly and repeatedly to the
dynamic of updates is akin to deeming yourself a fuddy-duddy, a
stick in the mud who needs to get with the program. Don’t you
love those people who send you emails asking why you have not
answered their last email? A message sent is an obligation
assumed, only the assumption is on the innocent recipient. Did
anyone imagine the costs of this social contract when they
started designing messaging systems?
I
have been thinking of this efficiency drive and how it affects
our lives and response to information as a result of listening,
of all things, to vinyl records. LPs have about 20 minutes of
music per side, they discourage jumping about or skipping
tracks, tend not to work on multi-disk players, and worse, the
best turntables require the user to be present to lift the
stylus off at the end of a side and manipulate the disk to hear
more music. The result of all this user activity, which adds
considerably to the effort of music listening, is that users of
records and turntables tend to actually listen. If you sit down
after starting to play an LP it is quite a bit of effort to skip
forward, there is no remote control, and you tend not to treat
the music as background sound since you have to remember to lift
the stylus at the end. From a typical usability standpoint,
turntables are disaster (and I’ve not even mentioned the care
and maintenance involved in making the medium work well), but
for me, listening on vinyl tends to create a very different
experience of music than using a modern CD player or even an
iPod. The whole interaction is paced differently and the
consequent engagement, the level of human-information
interaction, takes on a different quality that cannot be reduced
to simple usability metrics. Within that space, human responses
are qualitatively different, paced according to the IA
underlying their presentation.
Scaling
up the numerous devices and information architectures competing
for my diminishing attentional resources makes me wish there
were some way for us to talk at a more macro level when
discussing information. But this is not just a matter of
ubiquity or usability, this is really about the human rhythm of
information use, the coupling of person and process. I do not
believe we are fixed in this regard (outside of the basic
parametric ranges of our underlying biological and cognitive
architectures, of course), since humans have shown themselves to
be marvelously adaptable, especially when it comes to
information designs, but I do think there are two rhythmic
aspects to consider: the optimum one for a given activity and
the effects of altering rhythmic aspects on the experience we
have of the information. Is this an issue for IAs to consider? I
have no doubt that it is, but it surely belongs to the macro IA
camp (as I now refer to Big IA), made up of a surprisingly micro
number of folks, regrettably. But we can work on this.
Is
there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should
acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit
for each of us between tool and task, between goal and
accomplishment, between resource and purpose. Sometimes making
it faster just works against making it better, and I am not sure
where this insight finds resonance in information architecture
or systems design. The rhythm of interaction is partly set by
the underlying design choices and that makes it matter of IA for
me. Pace, timing and rhythm; there’s a whole world of
information architecture yet to be done.
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