Friday, May 06, 2005
Cognitive economies and information ecology
A recent trend of discussion in Information Architecture shows our interest in communicating the value of IA clearly in terms that business will understand. Along these lines, the points of a venture capital blog post were raised about "search costs," leading naturally to the consideration of the usability costs of poorly design search interaction.
Search costs draws from (micro) economics, which offers useful concepts to understand the business decisions inherent in information design. While the economics concept of search cost has implications for reducing the cognitive demand of information users, it does not imply search usability. But there are useful intersections between these points of reference, a domain of cognitive economics and information use.
In information behavior research, we look at information economics and decision making. Attorneys, for example, face trade-offs among different search costs in locating the information required to support an argument. They consider drivers such as their billable time, the likelihood of success, and paying for a quick answer vs. the uncertain footwork (and search cost) to get the answer they need.
They face numerous psychic or psychological costs as well, such as dealing with changes in routine (not something they like to do), learning new computer tools in order to perform an essential task, changes in terms or language in working from new sources, etc. In my opinion, user experience research easily underestimates the real psychic costs required to change behavior in any habitual work practice. The benefits must vastly outweight the costs of change, and these costs are vague and variable from person to person.
Cognitive science also attempts to measure or at least represent the cognitive overhead of memory and cognitive load, which are different psychic "costs" than understood in the economic sense of the word.
In the economics of decision making, (simply put) Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) has shown how people undervalue probable, but less-risky outcomes and overvalue outcomes they consider more certain. Applying this principal to information findability explains behaviors we find in user research studies. For example, professionals often don't like to take the time to personalize information tools, preferring to use the tried-and-true. Personalization could be seen as leading to various unwanted outcomes, and lost time. A certain outcome based on known methods usually wins out for those billing by the hour.
In the same way, professionals don't look for alternative sources once "satisficing" their need (unless due diligence requires it), or use advanced search features - unless they run out of options. I've found this to be a strong working finding in many communities of practice.
Probably the course we should be taking as a discipline is learning more about transactional economics and the cognitive psychology of decision-making, applying that to information design decisions. We do that all the time based on heuristics, of course - we understand the inherent trade-offs people make when navigating large information sources. We provide quick navigational escape routes in expected locations (top-right); we trade-off powerful search interfaces (which librarians like) in favor of powerful browse interfaces (higher expected utility); we organize information by priorities which we evaluate across defined user communities. But we don't use economic terms to express these distinctions and their value, at least not consistently. That may be a useful direction to continue pursuing.
Search costs draws from (micro) economics, which offers useful concepts to understand the business decisions inherent in information design. While the economics concept of search cost has implications for reducing the cognitive demand of information users, it does not imply search usability. But there are useful intersections between these points of reference, a domain of cognitive economics and information use.
In information behavior research, we look at information economics and decision making. Attorneys, for example, face trade-offs among different search costs in locating the information required to support an argument. They consider drivers such as their billable time, the likelihood of success, and paying for a quick answer vs. the uncertain footwork (and search cost) to get the answer they need.
They face numerous psychic or psychological costs as well, such as dealing with changes in routine (not something they like to do), learning new computer tools in order to perform an essential task, changes in terms or language in working from new sources, etc. In my opinion, user experience research easily underestimates the real psychic costs required to change behavior in any habitual work practice. The benefits must vastly outweight the costs of change, and these costs are vague and variable from person to person.
Cognitive science also attempts to measure or at least represent the cognitive overhead of memory and cognitive load, which are different psychic "costs" than understood in the economic sense of the word.
In the economics of decision making, (simply put) Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) has shown how people undervalue probable, but less-risky outcomes and overvalue outcomes they consider more certain. Applying this principal to information findability explains behaviors we find in user research studies. For example, professionals often don't like to take the time to personalize information tools, preferring to use the tried-and-true. Personalization could be seen as leading to various unwanted outcomes, and lost time. A certain outcome based on known methods usually wins out for those billing by the hour.
In the same way, professionals don't look for alternative sources once "satisficing" their need (unless due diligence requires it), or use advanced search features - unless they run out of options. I've found this to be a strong working finding in many communities of practice.
Probably the course we should be taking as a discipline is learning more about transactional economics and the cognitive psychology of decision-making, applying that to information design decisions. We do that all the time based on heuristics, of course - we understand the inherent trade-offs people make when navigating large information sources. We provide quick navigational escape routes in expected locations (top-right); we trade-off powerful search interfaces (which librarians like) in favor of powerful browse interfaces (higher expected utility); we organize information by priorities which we evaluate across defined user communities. But we don't use economic terms to express these distinctions and their value, at least not consistently. That may be a useful direction to continue pursuing.
