Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we
communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce
transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and
data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the
process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or
not.

(snip…)

In the coming years, our ability to interact with the information
we’re so rapidly generating will determine how successfully we can
manage our digital lives. There is a great challenge at our doorsteps—a
shift in the way we live with each other.

As designers of user experiences for digital products
and services, we can make people’s digital lives more meaningful and
less confusing. It is our responsibility to envision not only
techniques for sorting, ordering, and navigating these digital
information spaces, but also to devise methods of helping people feel
comfortable with such interactions. To better understand and ultimately
solve this information management problem, we should take a holistic
view of the digital person. While our data might be scattered, people
need to feel whole.