This article is from the April 2002 Issue of Update.
When online searching by non-specialists began, information professionals showed amazing hostility towards the first end-user recruits. At Ciber (City University's Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) we were always convinced that the disparaging of their search styles had much to do with professional insecurity. It all concerned the use of bibliographic systems, which had been largely devised for information professionals, academics and scientists. These were all niche players, using niche and limited systems. In football parlance, information professionals were playing at home, and end-users away.
All that has changed. All matches are home fixtures for end-users now. Towards the end of the 80s the number of end-users went through the roof, from hundreds to thousands, on to millions in the 90s, then tens of millions in the new millennium. No one disparages end-users anymore — there are too many of them for that, and we now call them consumers.
It wasn't just the numbers that changed, but the types of people using the systems (people without any previous experience of information systems — children, the elderly, etc) and, of course, the systems themselves. No longer Opacs to find references, but the web to download music, or digital interactive television (DiTV) to check out an ailment. No longer static, archival systems in public or work places, but mobile systems, real-time systems, interactive systems in the home.
Too often the response of information professionals to this total transformation (or loss, depending on where you stand) has been to bury faces even deeper in the information pillow. Or, even worse, attempt to build new information enterprises on the back of information mud huts.
But it is what the new information consumers are getting up to that concerns us as a research group. History has little to say on the subject. So we have been lucky enough to be among the first people to study one of the first — and much hyped — migrations of consumers to the web: that of readers of the news in print (1998—2000). Millions of people flocked to the digital newspapers we studied — The Times, Sunday Times, the Independent and the Guardian. But here we get our first glimpse of the strange world of the digital consumer: all these sites were haemorrhaging money — as they still are.
The digital consumer does not like paying for information, and advertisers are not at all convinced that consumers read the advertising on these sites, because they don't hang around for long enough. Despite the digital largesse of the media magnates, people still seem happy to buy hard-copy newspapers. In consequence, the hard-copy publications have to bail out their digital cousins, something which is becoming increasingly difficult, given the shortfalls in advertising income since the events of 11 September. The anarchy of the digital marketplace perhaps?
More recently (over the period 2000—03) Ciber has been charged by the Department of Health with evaluating the similarly hyped roll-out of digital health services to the nation. Health, forgive the pun, is allegedly the killer application in the digital information environment, and large sums of government money are going in to ensure that is the case (though they said the same about news). The lesson that the digital consumer will not pay has been learned, but has the government got pockets deep enough to bankroll digital health information? This time the roll-out is on a different scale. The consumer is being offered three digital platforms from which to make a choice — touchscreen kiosk, web and digital interactive television. Part of Ciber's work is to determine whether this really offers choice, or represents the digital fog descending.
Starting most recently (2001—03) Ciber has been studying the love affair with the mobile phone (February Record).
Plainly a few people in Clerkenwell evaluating the information-seeking behaviour of millions of people, on digital information platforms as diverse as DiTV, the web, touchscreen and mobile phone, require a special type of methodology. All these systems record the information activities of their users as a kind of digital fingerprint. We call them logs — they are the CCTV of cyberspace. We have them for millions of people, some for a period of five years.
As we write, thousands and thousands more digital fingerprints enter the database and will do so for a number of years, so we can monitor change and obtain a video, rather than snapshot, of the digital revolution. The logs are anonymised and generalised but nevertheless tell us much about patterns of information-seeking behaviour and a certain amount about personal characteristics — age, gender, postcode. Used together with online pop-up and traditional questionnaires, and interviews, the data is rich and revealing (but not so revealing that we break privacy laws).
The key findings from these three study areas compile a picture of the new breed of information user — the digital information consumer.
Characteristics of the digital consumer
Enormous and unprecedented numbers
Millions of people use newspaper websites. Indeed, the sheer numbers are probably the digital consumers' key characteristic. Even in the relatively new digital health field the numbers are beginning to mount up. The NHS Direct Online website attracts around 1,500 visitors a day, the 80 or so touchscreen kiosks of Intouch with Health attract going on for 1,000 people a day and 400 people a day access the Living Health television channel in the Birmingham area. Big numbers make big waves.
Personal profile
Our health research shows that there are quite different audiences for the various digital platforms. Thus DiTV users tend to be older (well over a third are aged over 55), health website users typically are 35 — 54, and kiosk users are largely young (under 35 years old). Women are slightly more likely to use digital health services than men, except in the case of DiTV and, interestingly, a kiosk in Safeway. DiTV users are also likely to be unemployed, a housewife/mother, or retired. This is encouraging in that it supports the argument that DiTV throws an ICT lifeline to those traditionally excluded from the digital revolution — the poor and socially excluded. And we all know about teenagers and mobile phones.
Short attention spans
Today's information consumer is a 'flicker', and flicks in response to massive consumer choice. As children use the remote to channel-hop, so their parents information-hop or bounce their way across the digital information terrain. Our studies show that more than 80 per cent of so-called visitors get no further than the home page or a single page. We call these people 'bouncers'. We are all bouncers. We either have a very short attention span, run up continuously against home pages we don't like the look of (quality check, maybe?), or are just hostages to a retrieval system (the search engine) that is constantly coming up with empty, irrelevant or uninteresting postings. Or, maybe, we are becoming information voyeurs? Even those who penetrate the sites — go beyond the home page — rarely wander far. They nibble rather than bite. This costs the information providers and sponsors a lot of money. They would prefer us to linger.
Novice retrievers
The digital consumer is confronted with the problem of retrieval. For all but experienced researchers, this is the first time they have faced the dilemmas of precision versus recall, of noise, and of deciding on the validity of sources. Publishers have to be aware of this and solve these problems in the same way as, in the past, they provided contents pages, indexes and TV guides. The role of content is becoming linked, in the user's mind, with its ease or difficulty of retrieval, and this is often outside the control of the original publisher. Publishers therefore are moving beyond questions of 'how accurate is this?' or 'how readable?' to 'how visible is it?'
The concept of an 'information player' is a helpful one in understanding how the general public interacts with digital systems. Continuing the sports analogy, few goals are scored in a textbook manner. Thus football stars, like Paulo Di Canio, are famous for their ability to do the unconventional, the creative. In any game of football, players do a lot of things that are not in the training/coaching manuals, but plainly they have received training. Similarly, a lot of information is collected by unusual means. Thus, maybe what is seen as idiosyncratic behaviour is not so odd after all — maybe it is just creative.
All-powerful
There has been a massive shift in power from information provider to information consumer. The digital world is now a world of abundant choice. People might only make a very short visit but they visit lots of sites — they are 'promiscuous' consumers.
What happens when the controls are taken off and people who have been starved of information, or told only what information is considered good for them, wake up to the fact that there has been a revolution and information is everywhere and easily accessed? Flood the area with information — pipe it into people's homes, surgeries, railway stations and libraries — and something really big is likely to happen. We have the makings of the biggest information bang ever (but some of us are deaf). The first rumblings can already be heard — after all there are millions of consumers on the information road. Families are using the internet to demand different treatment because they believe that it is better informed than their doctors. They report that their doctors have been surprised by their access to medical information, but have taken them more seriously as a result and, ultimately, agreed to their requests. There is every reason to believe that the computer will take over the GPs' gatekeeper role by 2020.
There is more than a little suspicion that the government believes the provision of digital information direct to the consumer will go some way to reducing the pressures on the health service — a case, maybe, of 'patient, heal yourself'. There is indeed some evidence to suggest this might be happening. Thus one third of DiTV viewers said that the health information found either helped or helped a lot in improving their condition. This constitutes an important use of a health information service. Significantly, the younger the respondent the more likely they were to report substituting information they had found for a visit to the doctor.
High speed
Total access and speed of delivery appear to be the consumer's key requirements when seeking information. These are the perceived characteristics of Amazon.com, but not of the academic or public library. And, of course, this is why the mobile phone has proved such a spectacular success — it's an always-on, real-time system. Nobody today wants to wait, nobody wants to queue — even if they could. Time plainly is a rare commodity. Connectivity is what our teenage mobile phone users yearn for. And what will surely drive the use of the phone as an information-retrieval medium will be the vast and ever-increasing amounts of real-time information becoming available.
Untrusting
The multiplicity of access points to information — TV, newspapers, consumer magazines, learned journals, radio, internet, PDA, online services — confuses the consumer and leads to breakdown in trust and information dissonance[1]. In comparison with print media, all electronic media (including analogue broadcasts) are difficult to navigate and reference. In essence they are two-dimensional, whereas print is three-dimensional because the shape of the whole experience can be successfully deduced from the physical form. For example, even the briefest knowledge of a print newspaper (which is not usually indexed at primary use level) leads the consumer to an understanding of what they will find and where, in a relatively standard formula. Digital formats, and the web in particular, have a tendency to break down this easy familiarity and leave the consumer floating in a sea of uncertainty. The consumer responds by losing trust and withdrawing loyalty.
There are also 'authority' problems that arise from a relatively new and fast-changing environment. With new players coming in all the time, authority is plainly 'up for grabs'. It is difficult to determine ownership because there are so many parties associated with the production of a digital information service. Take a touchscreen health information kiosk, produced by Surgerydoor, containing some information from NHSDirect Online, and located in a Safeway store. To whom does the person shopping in the supermarket, who sees the kiosk and decides to use it, attribute its qualities? To Safeway? To Surgerydoor — a company of which they have probably never heard? Or to the NHS, should they be alert enough to spot its logo? One suspects it might be Safeway.
Our research shows that where advertising is obtrusive there is a reduction in trustworthiness, and traditional quality marks, like that of the NHS, are of limited worth. Half the respondents in one study didn't even notice the NHS had produced the material (despite the strategically placed logo). In another, younger cable respondents were less likely to recognise the NHS as a symbol of trust than their elders.
There is a sense that consumers are more brand conscious, but less brand loyal. This applies to information just as much as whiskies. Information specialists have largely accepted that information (sometimes with, but sometimes without, an expressed value attached to it) has become a commodity. But they don't often accept the consequences of this.
Consumers converging?
Convergence is the buzzword. But everything that has taken place in recent years seems to suggest the opposite is happening. DiTV is the new convergent kid on the block. DiTV, the vehicle for WebTV, is not only a brand new platform about which very little is known, but also a platform on which much hope is invested. There is a sense, among politicians certainly, that this is the platform. It has real consumer reach, genuine general public credentials, and will thus be the main conduit for a whole range of e-government and e-local government services for the public. Essentially, the argument goes, everybody has a television (and soon it will be a digital television). More than one, in many cases. Everybody is familiar with them, and maybe most importantly, digital TV throws an ICT lifeline to all those who have been excluded from the digital revolution to date.
Conclusions
It is likely that information vendors and providers (libraries included) will have to engage in the same processes as other providers of goods and services, and put customer relationship management at the centre of the information experience rather than at its periphery (or, commonly, nowhere at all).
As Rakesh Sood pointed out, in an article published in TheStreet.com: 'What does the emerging promiscuous era hold for vendors? Locking in customers becomes more difficult. Vendors will need to further differentiate their offerings, re-examine their value proposition and stay on their toes while executing at a higher level on a continuous basis. While periods of temporary dislocation are inevitable, the customer is the ultimate beneficiary. Is it likely that, before too long, the adage "the customer is king" becomes transformed into "the promiscuous customer is king"?'[2]
References
[1] M. Bayler and D. Stoughton. Promiscuous Customers: invisible brands. Oxford: Capstone, 2002, passim.
[2] R. Sood. Making Promiscuity Pay (www.thestreet.com/pf/comment/connectingdots/
1014698.html; visited 11 February).
Professor David Nicholas, Barrie Gunter, Richard Withey, Paul Huntington and Peter Williams work at the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (Ciber; www.soi.city.ac.uk/is/research/ciber/), in the Department of Information Science at City University.