This morning, on my walk into work, I noticed my attention was divided on three things (I was multi-tasking)
- 60% of my attention was in my head, thinking about what I’m writing now (including any sub conscious thoughts and feelings I might be processing)
- 20% of my attention was watching where I was walking, and avoiding bumping into or stepping into something unpleasant.
- 20% was reading my RSS Feed Subscriptions on my 3G iPhone
I think, reading Twitter while on the bus, coming into Manhattan, about how @whitneyhess broke down her first month of being a Independant Usability Consultant - and that may have put me in the frame of mind to write about engagement and attention mapping.
Here’s what she said:
@hci I always planned for 50% of my time to be billable. But I work approx 60 hours a week, 6 days a week
in my first month of consulting I spent approx 25% on biz dev, 50% on project work, 5% admin, 20% networking. Other indies: what about you?
Suppose I transpose that way of thinking and apply it to what I’m doing at any moment - what do I have at my disposal to give in the way of my time and awareness? While walking, I thought about it - and….
…. and avoiding garbage on the sidewalk, occasionally (I noticed) I would gaze a little longer at something (maybe a microsecond) at some things while I’m walking (could be people, storefronts, or what’s on my iphone, that I was also reading).
If every block I walked on, on my way to work this morning, was a website and every storefront was an element or page on a particular site - then my attention breakdown starts having other implications. I guess the same analogy could carry over to Virtual Worlds, as well - every street is a “room”, my trip would be an Island, I guess - my navigation could be measured for “pace”, perhaps, even “gait”.
For one thing - I only have 100% of my attention to give at any time, when I’m awake, that is - if I’m asleep or semi conscious - I don’t need much or have as much-, but never more than 100%, i can’t give more because I don’t have more and there’s no way to borrow on that - what ever attention I place on anything - it comes out of the 100% I have any my disposal, while fully conscious.
OK, so on a brisk walk, my purpose is not to really look at anything in particular - and I’m unlikely to notice all that much, at least, not consciously, because I’m on my way to work - and I’m walking as fast as I can while reading my iPhone - but still - for moments I might gaze longer at some store front - and store that information for later.
What I’m maintaining here is three points
- Depending on my purpose (behavior) my attention will be measured/doled out differently
- If my purpose is to transverse - to get from one place to another quickly - then gazing for a micro second might be considered “engagement” and tracked as such - but it would generate no immediate action - nothing that happened this day - though I may act on it at some future time, like next week. In fact, if I saw something, like a store front, like it and came back at a later time, I’m much more likely to transact, or do something - this means that Engagement for the same individual/ same segment needs to be tracked over time - it’s much harder to make any sense of it from a single session - and that’s often what we’re trying to do in Web Analytics.
- It’s actually, the “interruption” of my “pace” or gait, that really marks that I was engaged (this does not in any way lesson the Engagement Mapping Score that Eric Peterson came up with recently - it just my reflection on my own behavior - my engagement here is the fact that my attention on the street went from 20% to 40% for a moment - and that marked some interest in my part of what I was looking at.
To me, that means Engagement, or Attention, maybe Attention is a better word, is marked by an alteration of “pace” of my gait, of my “click-stream”, movement, etc.
I don’t think we’re typically measuring or set up to measure that way.
Maybe that’s all I can really say about what happened this morning on my walk - except one more thing - all the Search Work I’ve been doing this - going back to @whitneyhess - it’s been taking Paid and Organic report data and trying to make something useful out of merging it - and I think I’ve succeed, at least to begin with - but it suddenly occurred to me that ………
- Keyword Searches that are general (ie: like “employment”, “job search”, “real estate“, “house plans” etc, are more akin to a “brisk walk”, like what I did this morning - the normal behavior for someone putting in these terms is to quickly transverse search listings, the point may not be to stay at any particular site - just find something relevant.
- The way to measure, I think, “Engagement” in Search Behavior would be to track those people who start at generalized search, like job search or employment or “nursing jobs, and end up on a much more detailed keyword phase - say “sample nurse education letter of recommendation“. You can say, with some authority, if the same searcher came to a Job Search Engine and put in the search “nursing jobs” then later, came back and put in the query “sample nurse education letter of recommendation” that searcher is “engaged” - fine if they did it in the same session - but we need to track them across sessions.
However, tracking Search Behavior across sessions is problematic - no doubt.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts about Attention - it’s 1%-100%, and it can be multi-tasked - and honestly, most of the time, how much attention do we really need to spend .. how often do we actually need 100% or even 60%.
The other thought I had - was the impossibility of keeping ahead of all of it - there’s no way - you can keep on top of all the RSS feeds of all the influentials - like Robert Scoble does - but still, sick one day, out of range of wireless or the cellular network - and the world is full of information that went on without you.
So while thinking about “attention” and if it really is “engagement”, it’s more like breaking browsing behavior and search behavior into basic types of activity - and then, measuring attention span based on that kind of activity, probably against an average.
Enough of this for now - just wanted to get this idea written down before I forgot it - so much of life is like that - it moves so fast that writing it down is necessary, or the point is almost irrelevant later - only to surface again, at another time, when it is then relevant, yet somehow different.
I’d rather write it down now.
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