Our paper on information overload, which was accepted for the OzChi'06 conference, deals with the question "What is information overload?", or "How do people perceive information overload", when they say they suffer from it. I'm not going to describe here all we did - for that you better go to the conference and listen to what the first author will present (yes, she is the one who "won" and is allowed to go to Sydney).
Our own working definition of information overload (IO) is the following:
Information overload is the feeling of stress when the information load goes beyond the processing capacity.
One of the methods we used to find out how employees perceive IO is cultural probing. Employees were given instant cameras and they were asked to picture their situations of information overload. We didn't give them our definition of IO, we left it open to their interpretation. The employees, after having taken some pictures, handed the camera to a colleague, who takes a few pictures, etcetera, and after a few weeks we collected the cameras. The result was a large collection of various pictures of work and home situations. People pictured their desks, covered with document, the screen of their computers with a long list of unread e-mails. Pictures of corridor talk, the telephone, a store room full with books, and one person even had a picture taken of his head. We tried to categorise the pictures, for some pictures we went to the person who took it to ask what he/she meant with it. For example, with the list of e-mails: does it mean "more work to do" or maybe "I don't know why I get this e-mail". We came to the following categories (from the paper):
Task Complexity, which is highly related to the work itself, Environment Distracters such as a nearby coffee corner or noisy machine, Social Pressure, such as requests for assistance, and Information Ambiguity when tasks or requests are unclear.
Most pictures were in the category "task complexity", followed by "information ambiguity". Task complexity could be explained by the type of work of the employees (research), which is usually not a clearly defined task. This we explored in another study, which is described in the same paper.
We saw that people started talking about the topic. Some participants found it fun to take pictures, others found it silly or said they didn't have time for it. For me it was a new way of collecting data. And even though it is not the same as doing interviews (where you can go in depth), as well as difficult to interpret the results (subjective - we see the categories as a first structuring), it is nice to see as well how many pictures were taken and how involved people became. I've never had so many questions of interest to a study. As a first step in getting a shallow topic, like IO, clear, the cultural probes study gave us a lot of insight.