Attention enhancing services

User experience vs usability

We have seen a growth in products and services that look to employ the use of “User Experience” experts rather than “Usability” experts. This is perhaps a reflection of the growth in services that users engage with over a period of time and on various mediums and touch points rather than within a single instance and platform.

Life enhancing services

Many of these services emerge from a category where they do not simply facilitate the creation of documents or the sale of products but attempt to help people get more out of life. There are currently numerous services that attempt to do this by creating on-line communities, socialising media and humanizing the relationships that we have with technology.

How to design for life?

This raises questions for designers such as: How do we adapt our design methodologies to reflect this change in the way we consume services? (Or more specifically: How does one conduct user testing and research of the interactions with a service over time). It also raises questions that emerge from the shift in the nature of what these services deal with. For example, a media sharing site doesn’t just allow you to share media with your friends but may also act as an extension of your persona. Combine this with the many other services that we use and we see a web of artefacts (blog post, twitters, photos, interactions with a service) can be aggregated into a ‘LifeStream‘. What do we need to know about the motives of people when interacting with these services? Only by knowing this can we design them so that they are ethical and fit for purpose.

Personal information

As part of this growth in ‘life enhancing’ technological services we have seen a movement that looks to give ownership of personal information to the individual who it is related to(e.g., Data Portability). As well as the philosophical arguments that surround personal information data, there is also the opportunity for individuals to benefit from it’s aggregation in the same way that business are able to. For example, a business may look at aggregated data about customer purchases, form conclusions and design their future systems accordingly. Is it possible for collections of data about an individual to be used to enhance their own life? Can the products and services that we use adapt themselves based on our personal information so that they are more useful?

Attention data

Part of this movement to give an individual ownership of their data takes particular note of ‘attention data’. Many of the services that we use (e.g., search engines, social networks and news readers) record information that indicates how we spend our attention. What we do on computers and ubiquitous devices (what link we click on, how long we spend on a page, who we are ‘friends’ with, what we search for) can indicate how we are spending our attention.

Signals Vs noise & getting things done

A few services have attempted to use this information for the user’s (or owner’s) benefit. Services such as engagd look to be a ubiquitous aggregation of how an individual is spending their attention and then aid them in achieving ‘flow’ by filtering ‘noise’ and recommending complementary information to that which they are currently consuming. This has become particularly important as the amount of web based services that we consume information through increases. These attention services could potentially be beneficial to individuals who look to achieve more with their time or be more efficient - individuals who subscribe to productivity methodologies such as ‘getting things done‘. They may also have a use for individuals who simply want to be able to find more relevant information or for creating a more personalised service.

How to design for attention?

So far, the execution of these services hasn’t lived up to the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding them. I believe that this is due in part because of the lack of adoption of standards (such as APML) but is mostly due to the complexities associated with the delivery of personal life enhancing services and the psychology behind attention.