Blog / Have we become conditioned to snippets of information?

16th December

A couple of years ago I can remember reading about how the internet was damaging our ability to memorise things. This was put down to the fact that we scan web content, skipping from one thing to the next, which has the effect of decreasing our attention span and therefore our ability to memorise things.

Social networks like Twitter have amplified scanning of information where we receive constant chunks of information allowing us to move quickly from one thing to the next.

What’s interesting is that user experience experts and user interface designers are starting to monopolise on our scanning behaviour and adapt their website designs to encourage this behaviour in order to increase engagement on their websites.

A good example of this type of design is the new BBC homepage. The design helps illustrate their vast amount of new content by delivering snippets of information coupled with images to draw the eye. Users are encouraged to scan through all these snippets in no particular order until they find what they are interested in.

A similar example of this design can be seen in Flipboard an application for the iPad and iPhone. Flipboard grabs feeds from Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The information is displayed in a magazine like format –  giving snippets of information coupled with large images or video. The overall effect is incredibly engaging – and encourages our demand to scan.

Design companies are also seeing this as an engaging way to showcase themselves, by mixing up snippets from blog posts, news items and work examples to give a dynamic impression of their company and the work that they do.

So as websites look set to become more scannable and less structured, how will this effect our attention span and our ability to memorise things? I’m guessing we should all play a bit more Pelmanism.

Posted by Tim

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