Should Everything Boil Down to Efficiency?

In a world that is constantly changing to try to make more advanced tasks and problems faster and easier to complete, people’s attitudes are changing to match. Societies’ attention span is constantly becoming shorter, while we expect to be able to complete more than ever before, at a faster pace. Our “Go Go Go” change in attitude has been slowly been showing up in different areas of our society, and it was inevitable that eventually the shift would hit the primary source of information to the modern world, the internet.

According to Jakob Nielsen, web users are starting to simply want “to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.” Web users are starting to not care how perfect the site looks, they just want it to load fast. They want to be able to grab the information, and run. They prefer their sites to the point, and lightning fast.

In this continuous shift toward efficiency are we heading toward losing something important on the Internet? I have had the experience of creating my own website, and the work that goes into it is immense. While functionality can be an endless task, it’s always the finishing work that make you feel the best. The perfect graphics, theme, and design that makes a site go from looking “Cool” to looking “Stunning” is the part that most web designers strive for. So what if no one cares anymore? Do we really want just a white page with the direct information on it? It would obviously be faster to searching the web but the process would become a tedious and dull task. Personally I prefer the extra couple seconds of load time so I can enjoy the site as I search for my information.

The world doesn’t need to boil down to just pure efficiency; people need to just slow down and enjoy the view. You will eventually get the information you need, but why not enjoy taking the ride? It’ll be less frustrating and stressful in the end, and by not getting flustered you will be just as efficient.

So the next time your cursing the web for information, randomly stop and check out the site.
Take 10 seconds and look at all the work that someone put into that page.

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