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PsychologyEstablished researchIntermediate

Selective Attention

Focused attention makes people miss things in plain sight, including changes to the interface they are using.

Definition

Attention is a limited resource allocated to a task. Simons and Chabris demonstrated inattentional blindness, where focused observers fail to notice an unexpected and highly visible event. The related phenomenon of change blindness means people frequently fail to detect changes to a scene between views.

Established research. Originates in published research and has been replicated. The effect is real. Its size in your product still needs measuring.

On this page
  1. Definition
  2. Why interfaces suffer from it
  3. Working with attention rather than against it
  4. In practice
  5. Sources
  6. Continue from here

Why interfaces suffer from it

A user completing a task has attention allocated to that task. Anything outside it, including a message you consider urgent, may genuinely not be perceived. This is not carelessness and it cannot be fixed by making the message larger, because size is not the variable that governs it.

Change blindness compounds it. If content updates while the user's attention is elsewhere, they often do not notice the change happened, only that the state is now unexpected.

Working with attention rather than against it

  • Place critical information on the path of the task, not adjacent to it.
  • Use motion sparingly, since it is the one cue that reliably captures attention and therefore the one that should be reserved.
  • When content changes in place, mark the change: highlight it briefly, or state what changed.
  • Announce important dynamic changes to assistive technology, which otherwise gets nothing.
  • Do not depend on peripheral indicators for anything the user must act on.

In practice

Missed inline validation

Forms

An error appearing below a field the user has already left is frequently missed. Moving focus, or summarising errors at the point of submission, is what actually gets it seen.

Silent background updates

Dashboards and feeds

Content refreshing beneath the user's attention produces confusion rather than currency. A 'new items available' control that the user triggers preserves their model of the page.

Sources

Where a source establishes something narrower than the popular reading of it, the note says so.

  • Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events

    D. J. Simons and C. F. Chabris, Perception, 1999

  • Change blindness

    D. J. Simons and D. T. Levin, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1997

Continue from here

Each link says what the connection is, so you can tell a principle from an alternative from a thing people mix this up with.

Applies when you are designing

A Dashboard

Explains

The mechanism underneath these entries.

Applied through

Where this shows up as a concrete interface decision.

Practical example

A worked decision where this was the deciding factor.

Related concept

Connected closely enough to change how you apply this.