Originally posted by pshui on September 21, 2019
Recent studies have shown that the collective global attention span has shortened over the years, especially in the recent decade. According to researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, one major cause of this phenomenon is due to the massive volume of information being presented to the public nowadays. As a result, people inevitably have more things to occupy the mind, thoughts as well as attention with.
Being in the Digital age, I can hardly recall the last time I could fully concentrate on something without getting distracted by my cellphone or overtaken by feelings of boredom, “disconnectedness” or “FOMO.” Like many others, I often find myself (unnecessarily:P) multitasking and flipping between tabs. It’s become natural for us to chop up our interpretation of the world into micro-moments, or bite-size engagements with reality.
Microsoft’s research on Canadian online users’ media consumption and digital lifestyles in 2015 showed that the overall short-term, ‘transient’ attention spans have shifted from 12 seconds in 2000 to a paltry 8 seconds by 2013, which is shorter than the average attention span of a goldfish. Besides, it’s further suggested that more than half of the population in the study aged 18 to 24 “check their phone every 30 minutes.” Furthermore, as much as one fifth of these online viewers divert from online content within the first 10 seconds. Along the same line, VP of Marketing for the Americas at Google Gevelber also revealed that more than half of the visits would be abandoned if a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load!
Corresponding to this trend, Google identified four micro-moments for understanding the needs of online users:
1. I want to know moments
2. I want to go moments
3. I want to do moments
4. I want to buy moments
Evidently, our brains have been rewired in a way that led to a shift in the online marketing culture. The constant craving for “newness” drives online users towards more rapid and “in the moment” mobile consumption.
Resources:
Gevelber, L. (2017, August). Micro-Moments Now: Why expectations for ‘right now’ are on the rise. Retrieved from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-immediate-need-mobile-experiences/.
Insights, C. Microsoft Canada. 2015. Attention spans. Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document/265348695/Microsoft-Attention-Spans-Research-Report.
[Untitled photograph of micro-moments]. (2018). Retrieved from https://storage.googleapis.com/twg-content/documents/micro-moments-understand-new-consumer-behavior-desktop-a.svg.
[Untitled photograph of micro-moments]. (2019). Retrieved from https://blogcdn.workful.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Micro-Moments.png.
I’ve never heard of term micro-moments until now, but I really like the concept. The challenge of figuring out what the user needs in the micro-moment is key to grabbing their attention and selling them a service or product. Perhaps a similar approach can be used in education. We need to figure out what students want in their micro-moment when they turn to mobile technology for learning. Are they looking for a one sentence answer? A 5-minute video? Or an interactive online tutorial? This is an important factor to consider for better user experience, especially in a medium like smartphones, where so many other distractions exist. It also made me reflect on whether the education system should adapt and create content more fitting for the new generation’s attention span.
I also was surprised by the statistics about our decreasing attention span. I definitely feel like it’s getting harder to focus with so many apps and notifications constantly competing for our attention. The notifications are designed to steal our attention and lure us to spend more time using the app. There are always things to distract us like the newest messages and the latest news. I find myself less patient and expecting to get an answer right away so that I can move on to the next thing that grabbed my attention.
With regards to the chicken or egg dilemma Pei raised, I personally think that the reduction in our attention span is fueled by the evolution of online activities. I think that the availability of short snippets of information online has spoiled us, making us less willing to spend the time to find what we need.
The topic regarding shorter attention span has been discussed multiple times in this course already, even though we are only on week 3! The frequent discuss about this topic demonstrate how prevalent the issue is and it is interesting the original author of the post mentioned something brought up by Google about “Micro-moments”. Basically it is the idea of fulfilling users’ needs right when they need it, whether it is the desire to learn, purchase, or to complete a task. If the needs are not met in a timely manner, business is at risk of losing the customers.
This phenomena leads to the chicken or egg dilemma – could we argue that after studying users online behaviour, business learn to adapt to user online habits and to fulfill the micro-moments needs OR do users/consumers have shorter attention span because after years of online activities, they are “trained” to the expectation that information should be delivered within seconds?