Internet – Jason Hensel

I’m all boxed out. It’s as every website I visit nowadays consists of boxes of text and images. Check out GOOD‘s site. Check out CNN. Hell, even Facebook has gotten in some box action, changing profiles to feature more of them.

Even for the company I work, its redesigned website features boxes. In a column on our site, Chris Brogan says that we are emulating Pinterest. That’s not true. We are trying to fit into the flow of how people consume information today.

“…the Web isn’t just an electronic academic journal any more,” Brogan wrote. “It’s visual. It’s bite-sized. It’s a place where we can choose an entry point and dig in.”

I’m in favor of ease. I’m in favor of nice website design. I’m also interested in what it says about society when website designers move toward boxes in their designs.

People overwhelmed with information and wanting categorization reminds me of a study by Laura L. Carstensen, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She published a paper in 2006 titled “The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development” in which she explained that “the subjective sense of a future time plays an essential role in human motivation.”

According to her study, when time is constrained, a person’s motivation priorities focus on emotional states rather than knowledge gathering. Consider this study in design terms–if you know a person has a limited amount of time for browsing, it makes sense to group things together so they can focus only on what interests them. Carstensen showed that people surround themselves with only a small group of friends when time is limited. The same goes with boxes on websites–people want to categorize their interests and friends. (Google+ prefers to use circles instead of boxes, by the way.)

There’s also a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research that says when people feel like they have no control over circumstances they seek boundaries.

“People often turn to aesthetic boundaries in their environment to give them a sense that their world is ordered and structured as opposed to random and chaotic,” the study’s author Keisha Cutright wrote. “When individuals no longer feel in control of their lives, they seem to seek the sense of order and structure that boundaries provide—the sense that ‘there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place.’”

It’s not surprising then that a lot of websites are using boxes. When all those boxes on all those websites start to pile up, though, it too can become as overwhelming as the information they contain. It’s like when you move into a new place and all your boxes surround you. The choice is to feel suffocated by them or get to work clearing them out so that you can live a free life, one that is fluid and less constrained.

That’s the design trend I’m waiting for someone to unbox.

(Photo via Flickr: Brian Brooks / Creative Commons)

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If you’re anything like me, you bounce around various news and magazine sites daily on the Internet. It’s rare that I consume one site totally. I more often graze on information like a starving student at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

This is common for a majority of Internet users. According to new research from the University of Missouri, “Internet users often do not make the conscious decision to read news online, but they come across news when they are searching for other information or doing non-news related activities online, such as shopping or visiting social networking sites.”

“Incidental exposure to online news is becoming a major way for many people to receive information about news events,” said Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a post-doctoral fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute in the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “However, many people don’t realize how their news reading behavior is shifting to more serendipitous discovery.”

Yadamsuren surveyed almost 150 people and found that they experience online news in three different ways. The first way is specifically on news sites. The second way they’re exposed to news is via non-news sites and activities, such as social networking sites and checking email. The third way is by just happening upon news while conducting other Web searches.

Because of the many ways people come into contact with news, Yadamsuren believes organizations should have links to their stories on various Internet sites as much as possible.

Fair enough. But just having links doesn’t necessarily mean people are going to read it. For a perspective on that, we turn to an interesting piece called “The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline.”

In it, writer Alissa Walker questions how the Internet is changing the way she writes.

“…when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.”

Meaning is what we writers and readers are constantly trying to find. What can I write that means something to someone? How do I find stories that mean something to me? There are no easy answers, because they rely on personal choices. You’re never going to write something meaningful if you’re creating quick-list articles. And you’re never going to read anything meaningful online if you’re always making the excuse that you don’t have time to read.

Where, then, is that middle ground? How do you find meaningful stories for yourself? What attracts you to online stories and news?

(Photo via Flickr: Mike Licht / Creative Commons)

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