Information overload

I ran across a post in Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog today describing an experiment performed at Harvard in the 80s (that there was no link to, so I have no way of verifying if I actually agree with Jonah’s paraphrasing of its results) that explored information access among groups of people, and how the level of access affected individual decisions. Reportedly, a group that was only allowed to see fluctuations in stock prices had their portfolio’s outperform a group that was given access to all the financial data they could handle. While I won’t speculate on the cause of this discrepancy, the results match up with the premise that too much information can be detrimental to the quality of your decisions.

The obvious follow up questions is “Well, how much is too much?”

Trying to find the answer to that question is the essence of information design, and the reason that the information architecture of any application is so vital to its quality. Striking the balance between overloading your users with data and not providing enough power to explore is critical. Of course, every individual is different, so creating a statistical model of your users via usability testing is quite valuable.

On a somewhat more relaxed note, I just ran across another of Jonah’s posts about overload of a different sort.