The key insight that you should takeaway from this module is that the human's attention is limited resource that has to be allocated wisely. Herbert A. Simon noted that "[information] consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." In prototyping a system, you should design user interfaces that effectively allocate people's attention.
Information design is the practice of structuring information to make it easy for the users to consume. The wide adoption of the Web and the spread of devices to consume information made the practice particularly important. One important role of designers is to structure information so that people can find the right information from the complex informational environment.
<aside> 💡 There is a scientific community studying information design. Pirolli and Card created a scientific model of how people gather information, make sense of it, and then act on it. They called it an information foraging theory (Pirolli and Card 1999). Information foraging refers to user’s activity for information consumption (e.g., finding and reading a Wikipedia article to learn about something). Pirolli have drawn upon models and techniques developed in ecological science to explain and mathematically model how people search for information in the complex informational environment. The literature built on top of the theory explained that user behavior in on the Web is guided by information scent, the perceived relevance of the information with respect to the goal of the user (Chi et al., 2001); researchers noted that strong information scent makes finding the right information efficient. If you are interested in learning more about the research, I recommend you to read “Information Foraging” by Pirolli and Card (1999).
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[NNgroup, Information Scent, https://youtu.be/-c9AUhXAFD8](https://youtu.be/-c9AUhXAFD8)
NNgroup, Information Scent, https://youtu.be/-c9AUhXAFD8
As a designer, you should consider the following factors to offer cues for information finding and manage how people attend to your interface.
Source: https://www.notion.so/Table-of-contents-50de58f824bf4100a4a9fa5b6f783c2b
You should introduce hierarchy to written information on your system’s user interface. Hierarchy brings about orders to the elements on a page and highlights them by their importance. In a written document, such as this lecture note, people pay more attention to the title and headings. People tend to skim through paragraphs, unless they contain the information that they are looking for. Using headers can let the user easily browse through the top-level information, and zoom into lower level information only when necessary. Apart from titles and headers, use table of contents, tables, bullet points, and numbered lists.
But there are more than providing a good hierarchical structure to making a document scannable: