How can designers maintain their users’ attention?
What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen?
Have you ever wondered what is the first thing that catches your eye when you visit a website?
How do we designers grab and hold someone’s attention to something that is important? And how do people really choose what to notice, what to pay attention to, and what to ignore?
As a designer, it is critical that our work communicates with the user. The main goal here is to send some kind of information that we believe will be useful to the users.
To truly capture our users’ attention, we must first understand how people focus and what they focus on.
Attention is Selective
People are easily distracted in many situations, and we must be mindful of this. This means that their attention can be pulled from the task at hand. People can also focus on one item while filtering out all other inputs. Depending on how absorbed or involved they are, it will be more difficult to get their attention. When doing difficult activities, people filter out distractions.
People filter Information
Information and cues that confirm one’s opinions are sometimes sought out and paid attention to. As a result, individuals frequently choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore.
Skills that have been well-practiced do not need conscious attention
A skill can be executed with a minimal of conscious attention if it has been practiced so frequently that it has become automatic. Playing musical instruments is a wonderful example.
Expectations of Frequency affect attention
If something is expected to happen based on its frequency in the past, our mind begins to pay attention to it automatically. This implies that we form expectations about how often particular events occur.
It takes around 10 minutes to maintain sustained attention
Have you ever wondered why you can’t focus on something for more than 10 minutes? It’s not your fault; it’s just the way our brains are built. We can only focus and retain our attention for 7 to 10 minutes on any one activity if it is something we are interested in; beyond that, our attention begins to fade and we will need a break.
People pay attention only to Salient cues
Salience is a term that expresses how noticeable or emotionally impactful something is. It’s salient if an element stands out from its surroundings.
We experience a lot of things every day through sight, sound, taste, and touch that we don’t notice. People are intuitively aware that their resources are limited, so the brain selects what it needs to pay attention to and what it can ignore.
People can’t actually multitask
Psychology study has demonstrated for many years that humans can only focus on one activity at a time. At any one time, you can only think about one thing. You can only do one thing at a time using your mind. So, we have the option of talking or reading, listening or reading. However, there is one possible exception: if we are performing a physical activity that we have done many times and are extremely skilled at, we can perform that physical action while performing a mental activity. You can walk and talk at the same time.
The most attention is paid to danger, food, sex, movement, faces, and stories.
Because of the way our old brain is structured, people can’t help but pay attention to food, sex, and danger. The part of your brain that is most concerned with your survival is the old brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, the old brain was the first to form. Your old brain’s task is to continually examine the surroundings.
Loud noises surprise people and draw their attention
Your subconscious mind is continuously scanning your surroundings for anything potentially threatening. As a result, everything new or unusual in the surroundings will pique your interest. However, if the same signal appears often, your unconscious mind will soon determine that it is no longer novel and will begin to ignore it.
People must first notice something before they can pay attention to it
You must be able to detect and perceive something in order to pay attention to it. Detecting something isn’t always straightforward. Although your senses detect a stimuli, this does not imply that you are paying attention to it. Sometimes the stimulus is present but you are unaware of it, and other times it is absent but you believe you have heard or seen it. Scientists call this signal detection theory.
Conclusion
With all this in mind, when we are designing something we should be aware that people are easily distracted, they also filter information based on their beliefs and our job is to focus their attention to the thing that’s most important.
Use pictures, tell stories, use loud sounds to imply when something goes wrong or when something is not used so frequently and also make it easy for people to undo their mistakes.
Make things stand out, use contrast, bold words, use animations, use videos but make them 7–10 minutes long.
Don’t make users multitask since they won’t be able to focus on anything and will lose their concentration, causing them to make mistakes.
This research comes from the book 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People, Chapter 40 — How Do People Focus Their Attention.
Feel free to leave a comment and tell me more about what you believe captures the users’ interest the most, and don’t be hesitant about clapping if you like my story :)
