Good Demonstration on the Future of Information Overload
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
This well produced video on Aurora, a concept browser of the future being developed by Adaptive Path in collaboration with Mozilla Labs (affiliated with Firefox), actually highlights the glaring problems of information overload:
- Too many online data sources provide conflicting information, so no conclusions can comfortably be made. Examples: housing market, oil prices, economy... who can get this right?
- "Clouds" of shareable online data are visual representations of Del.icio.us or other social bookmarking tools. Programmer attempts to pimp out the user experience with virtual world-like tools miss the fact that text is quite easy to browse and understand.
- Features that allow people to pop out and chat with you on the browser are detracting... and frankly unworkable for most busy people.
- Icon overload - browser screens are packed with "objects" that the user apparently should recognize from past web browsing. This is a real geek vision - programmers believing that the consumer can handle complexity online in the same way they should remember every detail of a video game. A user essentially uses a browser three ways - drag and drop, searching for data and bookmarking.
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