What you read and what you send on

Jonah Berger and Kathleen Milkman at University of Pennsylvania analysed the news stories from the New York Times that readers emailed on to others. They were surprised to find that, rather than sex and sensation, people tended to send on articles that inspired them or instilled a sense of awe, hence a higher proportion of science articles than they might have expected. They have interpreted readers' behaviour as aiming to establish 'emotional communion' with others rather than basic utility.

Of course what people choose to send to others may not fully represent what they are reading. It would have been great if Berger and Milkman could have tracked both.

Thinking of the links and articles I have shared recently, I wonder about my motives...

[via John Naughton]

Kindle and real reading

John Naughton has picked up (via The Princetonian) on the experience of Princeton students using Kindles donated by Amazon for their course work. One student reports:

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Which takes us back to Lisa Jardine's comments that ebooks don't yet support 'real reading.'

Will they ever? Will the iPod ever substitute for orchestral listening, or even B&O?

Digital Nation

PBS's much heralded Digital Nation showed yesterday. I'm not sure it tells us anything new but it includes some excellent interviews (Sherry Terkel, and a discussion of IBM's use of Second Life for large scale meetings). Also a chilling clip on the impact of remote warfare, 'Taking out the Taliban; Home for Dinner.'

Two different faces of Apple

Neil Curtis' condensed compilation of the hype at iPad's launch last week. [via John Naughton]

In contrast, Jonathan Ive quietly considering the design obsessiveness that makes the hype possible. [via Nordkapp]

Eye-tracking pros and cons

Just came across this succinct discussion of eye-tracking by Mark McElhaw of Webcredible. He points out the drawbacks of using the technology (from my point of view, the main one is that it can limit users' responsiveness to prototypes, unless carried out as a completely separate exercise to standard user testing). However he also notes the communicative value of heat maps: 'eye candy for senior executives with little time'. His strongest functional claim is that eye-tracking can resolve debates over the effectiveness of alternative web page designs, which can give designers more freedom to try out new ideas. There are interesting discussions to be had, though, when, as is sometimes the case, users don't like the most 'effective' designs.

iPad as prototyping tool

One of the things that occurred to me immediately on seeing the iPad was what a great tool it will be for prototyping and testing concepts for interactive devices. Nordkapp had the same response.

Reality check from Richard Thaler

"We're just a couple of university professors who can only just keep our offices tidy."

Self-deprecation by Richard Thaler, interviewed on BBC's Today programme this morning, about the likely impact of the 'nudge' philosophy adopted by the Tory party after publication of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. (More here.)

Thaler modestly suggested his book simply proposes other ways of motivating public behaviours, beyond nagging and penalties for non-compliance. The interview was given at Davos, bastion of modesty and self-deprecation.

Processing fluency and comprehension

The Psychologist features a review article by Song and Schwartz on how apparently superficial factors, such as the typeface or colour contrast of text, or the pronounceability of names, can influence our perception of the ease or truthfulness of text content, or the potential hazards of unknown substances, the viability of unknown investments or the potential enjoyment of fairground rides (these latter examples remind me of Monty Python on woody and tinny words). I confess to a slight problem with some of this research in that it contrasts Arial (easy to read) with Mistral (difficult to read, but also not designed for and rarely used for continuous text).

Interestingly, errors slipped in to texts which are in typefaces that are easy to read, such as 'How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?' are less likely to be spotted than when the typeface is made more difficult to read. Lack of superficial processing fluency also disrupts more complex processing of meaning. In the glory days of Neville Brody some typographers were convinced that disrupted typography (e.g. misaligning text half-way across the page) enhanced the content they were designing. Were they right? If yes, not in a good way!

Grist to the mill of information design.

[via MindHacks]

Internet use in China

Following 'Googlegate' FT has a fascinating account of internet use in China (based on research by McKinsey) showing how demographic and cultural differences (not least the difficulty of text input) bias Chinese use towards entertainment rather than work.

John Naughton has pointed to this CNET News video presentation of what exactly the issues have been for Google (and other companies) operating in China: a broader story than the security of dissidents' email accounts.

[FT report via Putting People First]

Younger and older extremes of media consumption

Kaiser Family Foundation have reported an in increase in digital media consumption by young people (8-18) over the past five years due, it seems, to media access on mobile devices. Digital multi-tasking (usually music, computer and TV) increases the number of hours racked up, with an average of 10.75 hours consumption packed into 7.5 hours. TV viewing on TVs has slipped slightly but increased overall through viewing on computers and phones.

(As an aside, a phenomenom I've noticed is digital 'infill.' If the stream of watching or listening broadcast media is interrupted by advertising young people immediately surf to get the best alternative content. It's irritating for their parents, but then you wonder what is their attachment to the interrupting ads?)

At the other end of the spectrum Pew Research Centre has found that older people lag significantly behind the rest of the population in internet access: 38% of over 65s use the internet compared to an overall average of 74%.

[Kaiser data via Putting People First; Pew data via John Naughton]