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Our minds process visual information at a rapid rate, which makes it tough for designers who need to create both instant impact and depth.

However, if people get the chance to click their mouse and move away because their perception tells them there's no point to going deeper, it means impact is everything.

Recent research conducted by the University of Vienna shows just how fast people process visual information. Its study focused on art and asked subjects to compare similarities and differences in various pieces.

Researchers found that subjects could register content in less than 1/100th of a second.

Within 1/20th of a second subjects had already started to interpret style.

All this happening before recognition of the whole object.

It shows that art directors and designers have less time than we originally thought to capture attention and stop people from clicking away with their remote button or mouse.


Posted by Ed Cotton we are hard-wired to be info junkies (34.08906131584994 , -118.245849609375) There's a good piece in the WSJ about research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

His research has found that we crave information, just like we crave food. If there's lots of information to look at and digest, we seem hard-wired to enjoy wallowing in it. This explains why fundamental disloyalty and clicking away from a site to something else is so attractive to us.

It suggests that the experiences we create for brands should be multi-dimensional and give the user more control, rather than something that's tightly edited.

It appears that we are happiest when we roam and don't want to be boxed in.

"In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.' "

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives."

Posted by Ed Cotton Now showing at the bottom of this post is Mr. Sterling's extraordinary presentation from the recent LIFT conference in Geneva, on 2008.

He takes on Microsoft; "Gates left because it was so boring!"

According to Sterling- Carla Bruni is the phenom that is defining our future.

Sterling suggests Carla's relationship with Nicholas Sarkozy is the product of an internet policy decision, the most interesting story there is and something no one could have predicted.  Sterling declares Bruni to be a Black Swan; a random, unexpected event that changes everything.

He goes onto create a series of 4 futurist scenarios for Bruni/Sarkozy based on the axes of ambition and publicity.

Funny stuff.



Posted by Ed Cotton Network fatigue is a big problem as web users experiment, use and play with so many differtent sites, each with its own user identites, passwords, friends and content, so perhaps data portability is the answer.



DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Via Cubicgarden

Posted by Ed Cotton The constraints of integration too often put limits on the creative application of a single medium.

The idea that interactive should follow the lead of television often doesn't make any sense. It's refreshing to see an idea that seems so perfect for the interactive medium and one where the agency has been allowed to play a little.

Poke's campaign for Orange all about a simple unlimited calling service, but it's been treated as an experience.

How many times have we seen this service executed in a boring and predicatable fashion?

Online, Poke have made it playful, random, experiential and masively engaging, it also translates the idea of unlimited into never ending and applied it directly to the web.

The end result is a welcome change from the predictable pathways most users are set.


Posted by Ed Cotton CNET has an interesting story about the rapid fire hiring practices at Google.

The company added over 2,000 workers in the last quarter alone and wasn't without financial impact,it caused a 3 cent miss in earnings. However, one analyst pointed out a more troubling fact that half the company has been hired in the past 12 month. That means someone who has been at Google for more than two years is not only a millionaire, they’re also a veteran.

Google’s internal brand culture is in danger of diluting to the point of meaninglessness, unless the HR people can step up and successfully “Googlewash” the new employee base.

Google is a classic example of a company that starts out as a challenger to the incumbents and the established norms, just like Microsoft did to IBM, but in a very short period of time, finds itself just like the incumbents it was rallying against.

In Google’s case, this has happened really fast, it clearly knows it needs to do everything it can to protect its unique culture.

There are some interesting thoughts on this notion from the company’s founders in this video. (warning...it's long, but comments about culture and scale are at 29m 25s)


 

Posted by Ed Cotton