Design for understanding, not distraction
Here’s a question: how often do you look beyond the first page of your search results?
Why don’t you?
Was it because you didn’t have time? Did the first few results look good enough? Did you just not care that much?
I get it — we’re overworked, stressed, and struggling to manage our own attention.
In such an environment, how can you really expect anyone to invest time and effort into trying to verify news, challenge their own assumptions, or see if there’s another viewpoint out there?
A recent Pew study found that people’s engagement with information is affected by several factors — but the two that really shine are: level of trust in information sources and interest in learning.
Using these factors, they found a typology of five rough groups of Americans, from most to least engaged:
- eager and willing
- confident
- cautious and curious
- doubtful
- wary
Here’s the kicker: 49% of U.S. adults fall into those two last information-wary groups, and another 13% occupy the ambivalent middle ground.
So, about half of the population doesn’t trust major information sources and has little interest in learning how to evaluate and engage with information better.
If you’re wondering why it feels like society is collapsing, see above.
Lifestyle certainly plays a role — 52% of Americans resonated with the statement, “I’m usually trying to do two or more things at once.”
When we try to multitask, we take on additional cognitive loads. Since human beings are cognitively lazy, this means we’ll tend to use simpler methods to solve problems (and won’t seek out further information), due to opportunity costs of time and effort.
On top of that, let’s remember that we’re in an attention economy, where most of the information around you is explicitly designed to hijack your attention from any given focus.
Most of us are also relying upon commercialized search tools (see attention economy, above), which fail to mitigate bias and privilege private interests, even as they monitor our behavior and mine our data.
Many brilliant people have already written about what’s happening — from very different perspectives — so I’ll stop here (See Safiya Umoja Noble, danah boyd, Tristan Harris).
What I want to ask is: what would it look like to design for understanding instead of attention?
How do we create platforms for information and communication that support and focus our fractured minds?
Knowing the broad context of our time-scarce lives, how do we privilege accurate information and surface marginalized voices, so that they aren’t buried beneath clickbait, misinformation, and misrepresentation?
Claiming that users are the best judge of content is disingenuous at best — we already have evidence that most of us are either not skilled at or not applying rigorous evaluative skills when we seek information.
There’s our tendency for selective exposure — we seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs and opinions, rather than engaging with discrepant data.
We’re also just cognitively vulnerable to distraction in an information context — research suggests that we are “information-seeking creatures,” which means that constant task-switching and foraging is to some extent wired into our brains. It’s hard to take the time to really evaluate anything when you’re constantly getting the sense that there’s something else you need to look at, right now.
This could help explain our reliance upon snippets and headlines, without ever engaging with the full content — a recent study by the MSR-INRIA Joint Centre and Columbia University got attention for showing that 59% of links people shared on Twitter were never clicked.
Don’t forget our tendency to more highly-rate information shared by those we trust (something that most participants weren’t aware was happening) — and that over half of Americans get their news from social media (multiple sources show this).
We need better systems and platforms, built for the public interest.
We need better ways to signal authenticity and trust, to support understanding and deep thinking instead of frantic page-hopping, to foster connection instead of perpetuating echo chambers, tribalism, and suspicion.
We need ways to re-contextualize information, to provide a sense of how and why information has been produced, and the broader landscape of that production, in order to fully understand complex problems and actually engage with different perspectives, instead of cherry-picking the top-ranked “facts” in our personalized feeds to support our preconceived notions.
Good news for my field — libraries are largely trusted as sources of information (ranked above news organizations, social media, and the government). We aim to facilitate the development of knowledge and understanding; we emphasize the importance of evaluating information, building context, and engaging with a variety of views in an ongoing conversation. (We also still have lots of work to do, and wrestle with bias in our own systems).
But still — libraries are nowhere near as integrated into citizens’ lives as social media and major search engines.
(Yes, I know, “just Google it.” See above: commercialized search engines and attention economy. Have fun!).
The problems we’re facing are complex, and will require a variety of approaches — some say open source algorithms, some say better privacy controls, some say open access to high-quality research, others have advice on how to fight misinformation based on decades of research.
But it’s not just the content.
It’s the delivery, the platform, the design, the experience.
We need partners. We need advocates. We need innovative designers and passionate developers to join the fight, to help us support better ways of communicating, of connecting, of truth-making.
Our communities are online, but online isn’t built to support true community.
This is a social endeavor — there is no truth without trust. There is no justice without an examination of the systems that perpetuate injustice.
This is a technical endeavor — we can’t truly connect without engaging platforms, without mindful design, without efficient solutions.
This is a human endeavor — we can’t do it alone.
Are you in?
