There’s an interesting discussion going on about the use of hyperlinks within articles on the web. Are they a distraction? Do they provide good context to link to additional information that may be relevant? Nicholas Carr’s original blog post that spawned the discussion makes some very interesting observations, including one that stuck out to me:
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read.
While I do agree that the different color of a link can be a distraction, I think one of the main issues that might be causing people to lose their focus is how to deal with links. I’m going to assume (and might be completely wrong) that when people click a link they go to the destination right away. This is very different than how I use links on the web. Whenever I run into a link that tickles my interest I almost always open it in a background tab. A simple mouse-gesture browser addon allows me to do this. I find myself easily opening 5, even 10 links while reading a single article, yet I do not lose focus on the original article as all of the links are opened in the background. Only after I am finished with the original article do I then proceed to read the new links that I’ve opened.
The discussions spawned around Nic’s post hit very close to home as one of the main drivers behind KwiClick is to help people stay focused on the task at hand. As you read an article and want to perform a search about something you read, your choices are to open a new tab and look at a full page of results or replace the article with a full page of results. So with KwiClick, we wanted people to be able to get those results without losing the context of their task at hand. Also built into KwiClick is the ability to open links in background tabs (simply right click each search result you see in KwiClick).
Looking ahead, I think there are still plenty of untapped ways/tools to help people stay focused on their tasks, as well as augment each task with unique information touch points to augment their tasks. We’re hoping that KwiClick can be one of those tools.
