Attention Economy Linking
In response to Angela’s detailed and thoughtful insights on the Attention Economy task I commented on her post as follows:
Hi Angela,
I chuckled when I read your first few lines as they were similar to mine as I also did not feel awesome after this task. We shared many of the same observations about this experience and I was impressed with your completion time (but you explain this should be longer).
I really appreciated your connection and reflection on the conditioning we experience as users of websites and how we respond to attention economy techniques. When you say that the “process really illuminated how little I actually think about the choices” it made me more aware too of the ways in which this passiveness can be exploited by using this knowledge in UX design. Ultimately it’s more than just the images we have a conditioned response to but also the way we enter text and as you mentioned engage with the click boxes. One of my biggest takeaways from this website was that how we engage with a website (conditioned or not) the UX is very helpful in determining the credibility of the site’s owner. A presumption of this task is that we are willing to complete all steps which in a real-world environment would not always be true, but I guess there was some benefit to making us more aware of the vulnerabilities of our conditioning.
Reason for linking:
When reading Angela’s post the line that made me stop and question my own experience was where she states “this entire process really illuminated how little I actually think about the choices I make while navigating the Internet”. While I agree with her observation that we are conditioned to respond and interact with images and forms etc. in a certain way I am unsure if I agree that I personally think very little about the choices I make. There are certain attention economy techniques that I give little to no thought to such as pop-up advertisements. I simply look for the close feature and move on and only get truly annoyed with these if they deviate from the expected forms and then force greater attention on my part. But when it comes to features like the captchas I always get annoyed when I see them because they force unwanted engagement and I can’t autopilot through them.
I prioritize the level of engagement that I undertake with any given website based on the site’s owner and need for engaging with the site. If it is a site that I am required to give more information to I pay more attention for example a government website or commercial site that requires credit card information. But if I am casually engaging with a site where I do not need something from it and there is a requirement to provide information I will always provide false information. If there are many attention economy techniques I may choose simply to close the tab once my frustration threshold has been met.