I was on-site at Supernova today. David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke during an afternoon panel. His new book is a thought-provoking work about how we need to get comfortable with the disorder of information spawned by the web. David covers a lot of ground in the book but I’d like to focus on the observation he makes about information overload. He says that the way to solve the overload problem (think 13bn web pages and growing) is to feed more information to the user. It’s a powerful, yet counter intuitive, idea to which I’d like to add a branch or extension.My extension is that users face a different kind of information selection problem depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle. Specifically, that the overload problem is much more acute later on in the lifecycle than in the beginning.Since lifecycles have a front-end and a back-end, we’ll break down consumption into those two spaces, recognizing that gray area exists. By front-end, I mean the user’s objective starting from the “point of inspiration”. There’s always something that motivates a user to seek out information to begin with. This inspiration can be casual or deliberate. A casual intent includes the desire to kill time or have fun…info-snacking, as they say. Deliberate intent is usually task-oriented but as I’ll demonstrate later, the distinction may not matter when it comes to overload.You might ask why information management would more challenging for users in the midst of consumption (versus at the start) when they face the same problem scope on the front-end as they do on the back-end (13bn pages to wrestle with no matter which end you’re into). To answer that you’d have to look at the “what and how” of content consumption from the “point of inspiration” to the “point of resolution.” Let me break that down.

Intent (whether casual or deliberate) is highly mechanized on the front-end. Most users follow known routines to seed consumption. These routines include where you go (web destinations) and what you do there (user interaction paradigms) to address an inspiration. You’re not overwhelmed by the idea of visiting Google News to find something to spend time because you do it all the time. You don’t think twice even though what you’ll read or where you’ll wind-up are unknowns. Sure, there’s a lot of choice but because you’re working within routines, you don’t feel overwhelmed.

Even where user intent is very deliberate (research-oriented), the front-end is not daunting because you will probably find a place to start browsing that is good enough. I’ve heard of research indicating that user’s wind-up with the same information flows no matter which link on the first page of search results they select. That supports the notion that the starting point is not the problem. [Digression: Could it be that where you start is miscellaneous?]As a user begins to get deeper into consumption, choice begins to multiply not because there is any more content out there. When users interact with information, their interests can grow, branch or re-formulate. Initial inspirations may still apply but new ones are brought to light. In other words, interaction grows the possibilities in the mind of the user. They settle into some form of temporary equilibrium, which I call the “point of engagement.”Here’s where information overload becomes a much deeper problem to solve. A user in the midst of content consumption is often an anxious one. Not only is the user browsing into new territories…..you could go in a number of different directions….and you need to relate all of that to what you doing right now. It’s exactly when the user is at the point of engagement that expectations begin to formalize. Engaged users have expectations about how much of, how quickly and in what order their content interests will or will not be met. There’s just as much downside as upside for an engaged user. How then to reconcile the web against this unstructured and growing mind mess? This is where David’s insight comes into play. To manage choice, you may need to throw more choices at the problem. Specifically, it’s helpful to surface related choices to users and group them by their associative properties. Why? Because choice helps qualify choice. For example, if I’m at a web site and wondering whether to take the plunge on a link it’s highlighting, I might look at what other links are being grouped with it. If the highlighted link is tagged with a phrase and I can review headers for other links under the same tag, that might help qualify it very quickly. In the same way, if I can view other tags associated with the link, then I may get a sneak peek into the types of topics that this link is likely to introduce to me. Here context is being related to choice to reduce the overload problem.

In this way, David’s thesis is demonstrated to be particularly acute depending where the use may be in the consumption lifecycle. At the front end of the lifecycle, the stakes just aren’t as high (even when intent is really serious) as when the user reaches a state of engagement with information flows that needs to be driven to some resolution.

• How the Web Destroys Categories
• Book Review - Delight in Disorder
• Interview with David Weinberger

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Tags: Information Overload, Content Consumption Lifecycle, Everything is Miscellaneous,