Question: What ideas have you got so far to help make technology more efficient ?

Anna Bramwell-Dicks answered on 24 Jun 2014:

Well, there are lots of ways we can make technology more efficient.

One key area (that I don’t actually work in) involves making the hardware itself work faster – we can do this by improving the speed of the processors in the computer itself.

But, that’s not really the area I work in at all… What I work on, is how we can make the people using technology more efficient which is a slightly different question 🙂

Some of the work that I have been doing recently has been looking at whether listening to music can make people work more efficiently. There has already been research that shows that the speed of background music can affect how fast people walk. So, I’ve been looking at whether people type faster if they are listening to music that has a faster beat. (At the moment, the answer to this question is “it’s complicated and we need to investigate further!”)

But, there are other ways we can design technology to help the users to complete their tasks more efficiently. Let’s think specifically about making websites more efficient. To do this, web designers should make sure that:
– their search functions return useful results
– the navigation bar contains words that meaningful
– the font is easy to read in terms of the style, size and colour contrast with the background
– the page content is not too much (and so takes the user a long time to read to find the relevant information) nor too little (and so the user has to spend a lot of time reading many shorter bits to find the relevant information).

There are lots of other things web designers can do as well, but that’s probably enough for now…