4 May 2005
Information Pollution
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General .
Information Pollution is the name Jakob Nielson gives it — When you’re busy working and an IM window pops up, grabs focus and takes the other half of your sentence to hell. All to show you a “hieeee… whatsup” message:
It is naive to believe that IM is the answer to the information overload that’s ailing e-mail. Continue current trends a few years and most people will get so much IM that they will have to tune it out to get any work done.
IM is even worse than e-mail with respect to one of the most important human-factors criteria: It’s interruptive of task flow because it demands realtime attention. Some things do need realtime attention, but even a one-minute interruption can easily cost a knowledge worker 10 to 15 minutes of lost productivity due to the time needed to reestablish mental context and reenter the flow state. That’s why one of the best ways of increasing the productivity of programmers is to give them individual offices. And that’s why no e-mail program should come with the biff feature turned on by default. (Biff is the annoying ability to ring a bell or flash the screen every time an e-mail message arrives. In fact, the world economy would gain several million dollars per year if this feature were completely eradicated.)
