Logics of Attention in Web-Based User Experience Design and Engineering

• In Event: Attention! - III: Pauses and Punctuations of Experience

Abstract

This paper explores how attention manifests in the efforts of browser vendors and web developers to use design, engineering, and behavioral psychology to improve the “user experience” of web pages and web-based applications. The paper is based on 14-months of ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area on the techno-politics of privacy, broadly organized around the privacy and security engineering team at a major browser vendor. During this fieldwork, I observed that the engineering of a culturally meaningful form of privacy into commercial web products and services is entangled with efforts to improve the speed, interactivity and overall usability of web technologies. The paper seeks to ground contemporary cultural anxieties about the technological “hijacking” of attention in relation to the more varied set of affective and relational states that web technologies are designed to cultivate in users under the sign of user experience concepts like “performance” and “engagement.” The paper will describe the aesthetic, affective, and temporal logics of the strategies deployed to cultivate such states. It argues that the form of attention produced and measured by related technical metrics, such as “first paint” and “time-to-interactive,” is itself circumscribed by a series of interlocking, but only partially articulated “attentional economies” governing the relationships between and among technology developers, corporations, users, and investors. These include, for example, the efforts of start-up founders to capture the attention of venture capitalists using stories of explosive user growth.

Author

• Lake Polan, University of Chicago