Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details. Our attention is limited, and there is only so much that we can focus on in terms of both capacity and attention.
Understanding the psychology of attention helps to make sense of how humans are perceiving and navigating through digital interfaces.
Change blindness
Change blindness refers to the phenomenon where individuals fail to notice significant changes in their visual field, even when the changes are apparent. In the context of UX design, change blindness can affect users’ perception and understanding of interface changes or updates.
Why does change blindness occur?
Change blindness occurs because human attention and perception have a limited capacity. Users may not notice changes if they are not explicitly focusing on or expecting them.
Small or incremental changes in a user interface are more likely to go unnoticed. This include colour variations, subtle layout adjustments, or minor content modifications. Users tend to rely on their memory of the previous state and may not actively compare it to the current state.
Users develop mental models and expectations of how a particular interface should look and behave. When changes deviate from these expectations, users may not immediately notice them.
How to mitigate change blindness in users?
UX designers can make use of the following strategies to ensure that important changes are noticed and understood by users.
- Visual Cues: Use visual cues, such as highlighting, animation, or motion, to draw attention to changes and help users notice them.
- Progressive Disclosure: Instead of making simultaneous extensive changes, consider gradually introducing modifications over time, allowing users to adapt and perceive the differences more readily.
- Clear Feedback: Provide clear feedback or notifications to inform users about interface changes. This can be achieved through alerts, tooltips, or onboarding experiences
- User Testing: Conduct user testing to identify instances of change blindness and gather feedback on the effectiveness of interface updates. This can help improve the visibility and discoverability of changes.
Selective attention
The Invisible Gorilla experiment, one of the best-known psychology experiments on selective attention, reveals that that people who are focused on one thing can easily overlook something else.
Two key findings from the experiment are: we are missing a lot of what goes on around us when we are focused on one task and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.
How does this apply to user interfaces?
In a previous article, I wrote about how people rarely read word for word on the web. People scan the page to look for keywords that can point them to what they are looking for.
In most scanning patterns below, you can see that the fixation points are on the headings, sub-headings, images and call-to-action buttons.
We can see that they skip past irrelevant content. Only if a particular heading interests users, they will then scan the description. That’s not surprising as our attention is limited.
With an understanding of selective attention, we can use the following strategies to guide users to what they’re looking for:
- Position related items close together
This relates to Gestalt principle of proximity, which claims that things closer to each other appear more related than things farther apart. Proximity has a power influence on visual perception, to the point that it can even override other factors such as similarity in colour or shape.
- Use clear headings and subheadings: Use clear, simple and non-repetitive wording
- Front loading: Place important information/keywords up front in structure of content
- Chunking: Break content into small, distinct groups. Methods of chunking include having short paragraphs, short lines of text, grouping related items together.
With a better understanding of how humans pay attention, we can better design content and interfaces in a way that guides them to what they are looking for.
