Eric E. Ellis | Web Design | Project Management | ProjectEric.com | Charlotte, North Carolina

I just watched Eli Pariser’s TED talk, based on his novel The Filter Bubble.  In it, he discusses the need for web behemoths like Facebook and Google to consider the implications of filtering and personalizing content to such a degree that users simply see the world from their own bubble.  For instance, I may see an entirely different search result for the keyword Egypt than someone who has completely different likes and dislikes from me, perpetuating the notion that the Egypt content fed to me is ‘right’ and content that doesn’t get fed to me is not as relevant.

Marketer and blogger Douglas Karr has another take on the issue, comparing the bubble concept to one of his daughter’s friends who filters her worldview based on news she receives from Facebook, CNN, and Jon Stewart.

Watch the TED video and read more

I got to thinking: how does the so-called filter bubble cascade down to web design?  My conclusion was drawn from the very end of Pariser’s TED talk: choice, and control.

Pariser’s argument was that, unbeknownst to him, Facebook was deliberately filtering out comments from his opposing-view conservative friends in his News feed simply because his Facebook-searching habits tended to sway more to the left.  In other words, Facebook’s opaque algorithms filtered what he saw based on what it believed he believed.

The better experience, he argues, is to give web users choice: just as we have the choice which conservative- or liberal-leaning newspaper or online magazine we might pick up, web experiences must empower us to decide what we want to filter.  Remove the filter power from dispassionate, uninformed algorithms, and you arguably remove the ‘me’ bubble.

I’ll be applying this theory to an upcoming project.  Rather than forcing users to see geographic search results I’ve told the search algorithm to choose and display, instead I’ll be thinking about giving users the choice to select what they want to see in other geographies: combine convenience with control.