Design information distance from human information needs

What is information distance exactly?

When we are talking about information distance, we are talking about the distance between the information and people, the shorter the distance, the easier it is for users to get the information. Different types of information, different user segments and different scenarios require different distances. For example, for backpackers who travel frequently, air ticket information needs to be in a handy place, but for families who go out for vacations 2 or 3 times a year, instead of air ticket discount information, they may prefer to browse some travel stories in daily life, because families usually have a relative fixed schedule and just won’t leave because of a cheap ticket, but once they start to make a plan, the demand for ticket information will reach a small peak in the short term. The design of information distance is everywhere, for example, iOS 14 widgets and app clips.

In the digital world, the information distance lives in the digital products, or more specifically, lives in the information architecture of digital products. This is where the design complexity comes in: when designing a new product, designers are asked to make a lot of decisions while balancing many known conditions/constraints that brought by, say, attitudes or behaviors of different user groups, scenarios, the nature of particular kinds of information or technical limitations (the problem becomes even more complex when we realize that there are constraints which we can not identify when we design, even those we can will eventually change in the future). These decisions include which information should be put nearer to users, which can be put a little bit further, how should we organize the information so that users can understand where to fetch those information.

This article will discuss how to think when designing information distance, hopefully it can provide some help for designers when they make those decisions.

When we design, we come across 2 subjects: human and the digital product. We hope we can design a digital product that adapt to human as well as possible, just like designing a piece of fit and comfortable clothe. But how do we evaluate how well it adapt? How can we have enough confidence that we are going towards the right direction as we design so that despite unreasonable design exists, there is always room for improvement?

If we want to make sure that we are designing for improvement, then we need to understand these 2 subjects; If we want to make sure that we are designing the information distance for improvement, then we need to understand human information needs, and the information distance that lives in the products. Let’s start with human information needs.

Human Information Needs

Let’s diverge a little and look at the concept of “needs” from a slightly macro perspective. It is obvious that needs cannot exist alone, they must be attached to a goal.

Figure above shows a way to understand the relationship between needs and goals: we have needs, in order to fulfill a particular goal, needs reflect our current status, goals reflect our preferred future. Change doesn’t happen from nowhere, it is actions that connect the current status and the preferred future. For example, I want to buy a dress (needs), because I want to have a good mood when I go on a vacation next month (goal), but to actually get the dress, I have to browse, select, compare and eventually purchase (actions).

However, needs don’t always trigger actions, unless people have enough motivation, or else they won’t easily give away their precious time and energy. When making decision on whether to act or not, people will think about:

• How important is this goal to me? (Perceived value)
• How hard is it to achieve this goal? (Perceived cost)
• What resource I have that can help me to achieve this goal? (Perceived owned resources)
• If I fail, what will happen? (Perceived risk)
• …?

All of the above are based on people’s subjective judgments. For example, the risks I think I will face and the risks I actually will face may be two different things. Decision-making varies from person to person, which is also an important reason why designers need to learn through user research: by placing ourselves in the user’s mental model to learn their decision-making process, so that we can design the product that is able to participate in this process, encourage users to take action, and ultimately help users achieve their goals.

Back to information needs. Information needs are relatively small, for example, I have a need to buy a car for daily commute in the city, this particular need can be broken down into a number of small information needs such as car price, configuration, insurance, etc. While some information needs are independent needs themselves, for example, I want to know the minimum wage under my current contract to protect my labor rights.

Above is the relationship between needs and information needs. Let’s go further back to the context of designing information distance: when designing information distance, how should we analyze people’s information needs? What do we care most about information needs?

We care about: the cost people are willing to spend to obtain information, because it is closely related to how deep we should put the information.

So the question now has become: “How can we find out the cost people are willing to spend to obtain information?” According the our previous analysis on the concept of “needs”, we know that needs must be attached to goals, so do information needs. So to analyze the cost people are willing to spend, we need to look at the corresponding goal first: what goals am I going to achieve when I am searching for information? To have fun and to survive are two completely different stories, and thus the decision-making process and actions taken by people will also be completely different.

In addition to goals, from what angles can we think about the cost that people are willing to spend to obtain information? I managed to find the other 2 thinking dimensions, which are applicable for most of the interactive scenarios where users obtain information through digital products. The meaning of these 2 thinking dimensions is that there are certain rules we can derive from them, and those rules can help provide guidance for design decisions.

• The frequency, high or low: the higher the frequency of needs, the more people expect the information to be within reach, that is, the lower the cost they are willing to spend, and vice versa. This is just like organizing your desk, you will put pens and tissues right next to you because you use them all the time, but store those finished books inside the drawers because you know you might not need to read them again.
• The intention, vague or clear: the vaguer the intention of information needs, the lower the cost that people are willing to spend, and vice versa. Because for such information needs, the return is uncertain, so there will be higher threshold for people to start searching. We call the information acquisition with vague intention as “browsing” and acquisition of information with clear intention as “search”, such as “browsing” travel stories and “searching” for a hotel.

To summarize, goal, frequency of information needs and clarity of intention to get information determine the ideal information distance. But frequency and clarity of intention differs between different user segments and different scenarios. We need to find out the target user segments first, and then find out the main scenarios for different user segments, at last we get the frequency of needs and clarity of intention to get different types of information, for different user segments, under different scenarios, so that the product we design is able to present information with as ideal distance as possible for different groups of people, under different scenarios such as different time and place.

But how is the information distance reflected in the products? What is near and what is far?

Information Distance Reflected in Products

Let’s start with the easiest one: hierarchy distance. Obviously the more jumps between pages mean farther information distance. Because first, these jumps increase user’s cognitive load significantly: jump means losing most of the reference objects. Secondly, they burden user with decision-makings: every jump requires user’s operation to go to the next page, user has to decide whether he wants to continue or not, and if he does, he has to find out the entrance. Lastly, more jumps mean more time, such as more potential loading time. Note that the hierarchical distance here is not just about user going deeper following the information hierarchy, but also user using shortcuts to navigate information (as shown in the figures below), for example, Amazon provides shortcuts for user to visit recommended items directly from product details page.

In addition to hierarchy, there is also a very important information distance that is easily overlooked: the distance within interface. In the current mainstream design paradigm, some examples are:

• Whether the information is on the first screen, and whether the interface provides enough clues for users to slide down and search
• The visual presentation of information, including the visual position, size, contrast, color, picture/animation, etc.
• The hint of the way of scrolling, it is generally considered to be easier to slide up and down than left and right
• The ease of finger reach, as larger screen has become popular, many mobile applications decided to move most-used functions down to the bottom of the screen, such as search

This information distance is fully reflected in search function, because search is to quickly locate information in limited screens and jumps, so the information distance created by visual clues becomes very important.

The last type of information distance is more abstract and difficult to analyze: understanding distance. Whether the information can be understood is very important, even we put it on the first screen of homepage with the largest font size and heaviest font weight, if user can’t understand, user will leave. Therefore, we need to learn to understand the problem the same way as the user, classify and organize the information the same way as the user. Below are some questions we need to pay attention to when we design:

• Can user understand how the information is classified? Can user quickly get the rule/logic of the classification?
• Is the hierarchical path of information aligned with the user’s expectations? For example, can user know that the digital albums he purchased are under the “favorite” folder?
• Are we using the same language that users use? Will there be any ambiguity?

Some Other Considerations

Above we talked about that goal, frequency of information needs and clarity of intention to get information determine the ideal information distance, and we also talked about 3 types of the information distance reflected in the product. In theory, we can start working towards the ideal information distance right now, but there are some factors which don’t necessarily yield rules also need to be considered when we design information distance:

• Design strategy: for example, in order to better fit the information needs of the main users, we have to sacrifice the experience of the minority, or we have to deliberately design complicated operations to avoid irreparable consequences
• Marketing strategy: for example, a newly launched event needs to be advertised in a prominent place
• The nature of the information element itself: although some information has a low frequency of needs and a clear search intention, it can be time-sensitive, for example, buying tickets for a very popular concert. In this case, we need to rebalance its information distance.

These considerations might bring constraints and conflicts to the design. How to balance them is a more complicated topic, we won’t dive into it in this article.

If we think like this…

Suppose we are designing an online travel app. If we do the information classification in a systematic or pure logical way, we may consider the “discount air ticket” as a sub-category of “air ticket”, and this means that user needs to go to “air ticket” first, only then can he see those discount tickets. Obviously this is not a good design decision.

Is there a better way? What if the app can learn from my behaviors and habits, recognize how often I check the discount information, then it can automatically adjust the information distance, push the information closer to me when I need it, whether through the first screen of the homepage or the widget.

Or what if the information is not organized by apps?

If we think like this, if we step out a little from the systematic classification thinking and reorganize the information according to human cognition and behavior without undermining the user’s hierarchical cognition, if every information people need is in the right place, and they can reach it when they need it, then maybe the product we design is one-step closer to human.