Pace, timing and rhythm in information architecture

ncreasingly the technologies of inforI mation 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 2 1 st 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 (Continued on page 29)