Google, the Ken Burns Effect, and Fractal Cognitive Engagement
I've learned a lot of things from Ze Frank and his show, but probably the biggest was that if you've got an idea stewing in your brain, get it out there before you boil it down to nothin'. Or was it that you should add lots of pepper and not blink because you might sneeze into the stew? Now I'm confused.
Anyway, the idea I'd like to dump tonight is a video explanation of what I think my brain does when I quickly scan a google search hit list - it's not some cheap and dirty quickie information snatch, rather it's a fairly complex and robust cognitive engagement we're doing each time we scroll up and down, or follow a link and go back.
Actually, I think it's a lot like the difference between the "Ken Burns Effect" and zooming in and around a fractal landscape. What's in our brains, and how we process what we see, is complicated and deep and interconnectedy like that fractal, but what we do when we scroll up and down a search result page is more like panning and zooming in on a picture. To wit:
(If you don't see the video here, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijLDxgALc2c.)
The point being: it might *look* like a cheap video effect, but the simplicity of the user interface lets the user do the cognitive mapping in and out of their mental landscape.
There! I've been wanting to get this one out for a few years. I hope it makes sense.
Mita (not verified) on April 25th 2007
Glad you got that idea out there and that you didn't get addicted to in its brain crack form.
Sometimes I think we are afraid of giving users an information rich environment because we don't want them to get lost. But as illustrated so well with the fractal picture, an information rich environment is fun to explore and worth getting lost in.
dchud on April 25th 2007
You wrote:
Exactly! That was the first episode of The Show I watched, thanks to your link way back then. :)
Then you said:
I guess my concern is: we don't want to confuse richness of interface with forcing too much cognitive complexity involved in learning how to navigate it. The information is always rich, and what's happening in an individual's brain is always complex, but the more clarity and simplicity we can bring to the point where those two things (info and brain) run into each other, the more we let the brain do.
Gosh, I have no idea if that makes any more sense at all. You can see why I've held off writing this for so long... at least it's out of my brain now though!
jessamyn (not verified) on April 25th 2007
This is a really good point. I even dial it back even more and talk about the normal ways we can think about information that Google doesn't represent. Maybe they forgot it was important, or don't care, or just are trying to simplify at teh expense of depth. But things like "date posted" "word length" and other things that a computer will just know about an item do not become part of the record that Google shows you.
When you started this, I thought it was going to be some sort of approach where you described the ways that librarians use Google that are different from the way average users use it -- iterative searching, for example -- but this was equally interesting. Thanks.
Jeremy (not verified) on April 26th 2007
So, there's podcast, there's screencast, and now we have 'floating-head screencast' ;-). Actually, quite a nice post, and it brought back to my mind Jef Reskin's work with Archy and Zoomable interfaces (see http://blog.libraryfind.org/2007/4/25/zoom-zoom-zoom).
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