A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

Post by cratermoon » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

Andrex wrote: post #37

rdiddly wrote: post #30

Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of easily understood things are a distraction.

It seems like this is a leaked internal presentation from Google, not meant for public consumption. That's what I take away from "Google Confidential and Proprietary" in the bottom right. Some more context over what this is and who wrote it would be immensely valuable. Edit- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764579

Post by waterhouse » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

epivosism wrote: post #11

cmehdy wrote: post #2

For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention. I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.

The enforced ~500ms loading time between slides is a killer. Why not preload and display them immediately?

Post by monocasa » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

Zelphyr wrote: post #90

All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits. At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful…

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

asteroidbelt wrote: post #66

lamontcg wrote: post #46

Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with. Then start doing something about regulating advertising. In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them constantly demanding that we pay attention to them. But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model.

Junk e-mail is not an issue at all (at least in GMail, not sure about other providers): they go by default into "Promotions" folder (not visible by default), and it's not hard to go to that folder once a day to click "report spam" on those which are not important, and that's enough for train Google classifier to send them to spam next time.

Post by cratermoon » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #95

cratermoon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion? The actions of a few people with a certain common worldview having an impact on billions of peoples and the effects of that worldview ought to be examined, what's the objection to that? > the problems still exist because the incentives are there Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the rewards?

It’s worthwhile to note the impact that few people have, but I don’t see how calling out demographics has any impact on YouTube video recommendations as a design pattern. Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn’t make such choices, when the high level business goal is to retain people’s attention for as long as possible? The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of…