{"id":130,"date":"2008-02-07T12:43:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T20:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=130"},"modified":"2008-02-07T12:43:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T20:43:00","slug":"attentional-cost-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/attentional-cost-of-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Attentional cost of information"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Hudson (of CMU HCII) gave an excellent talk today, of which the take-away point was to balance the value of information<\/span> with the attentional cost of displaying<\/span> that information.<\/p>\n

In an information-saturated world, the scarce resource is attention. \u00a0It’s easy to forget the significant cost associated with any given piece of information – the time spent absorbing it (or being interrupted by it). \u00a0This is similar to the sometimes-forgotten truth about innovation that figuring out how to do things more cheaply is at least as important as doing things that before couldn’t be done.<\/p>\n

In interface design, Scott aims to maximize the “C*I-A model”: \u00a0(communicative ability) * (importance) – (attentional cost). \u00a0In other words, you show the things that convey more information that is more important and have low attentional cost.<\/p>\n

On interruptibility<\/span>, he advocates following the human 7-step process of greeting negotiation:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. sighting<\/li>\n
  2. orientation – looking back<\/li>\n
  3. distant salutation (head toss, which is culturally independent)<\/li>\n
  4. approach (step towards and look away)<\/li>\n
  5. end approach (stop and look up)<\/li>\n
  6. close salutation (handshake, utterance, etc.)<\/li>\n
  7. reorientation (90\u00b0 conversational stance)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If computers were better at following this type of process, they could more effectively negotiate for a user’s attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Scott Hudson (of CMU HCII) gave an excellent talk today, of which the take-away point was to balance the value of information with the attentional cost of displaying that information. In an information-saturated world, the scarce resource is attention. \u00a0It’s easy to forget the significant cost associated with any given piece of information – the … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “Attentional cost of information”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}